


when I was worshipped as a god

by LightDescending



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andromache is Bi/Pan, Andy saved herself over and over again, Andy | Andromache of Scythia is Too Old, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Artistic Partial Nudity, Backstory, Character Study, Civilization Collapse, Civilization Renewal, Embedded Images, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Cannibalism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Sex, It's Tough to be a God, Minor Character Death, Neolithic period through to the Iron Age, Plague, Promises that can't be kept, Recovery from trauma, Recurring Temporary Character Death, Resilience, Tragic Misinterpretations of Things Said while Stoned and In Love, andy-centric, but meeting Quynh helped save Andy too in different ways, chosen names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 12:33:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29225502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LightDescending/pseuds/LightDescending
Summary: Featuring illustrations byandromachete, akavenompunk!Her name was not always Andromache. Betrayed in battle and left to die, she rose again. For centuries after, she led her people, a warrior queen blessed by the gods - perhaps a god herself. She lived through so much: the domestication of horses, the development of written language, the collapse and emergence of countless cultures and civilizations.Yet it was not just loneliness that compelled her to leave her people behind. It was something else.This is a story of Andy's first three millennia of immortality: what she gained and lost, how she endured, and why Quỳnh changed everything.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Original Female Character(s), Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Original Male Character(s), Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 100
Kudos: 64
Collections: The Old Guard Big Bang





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was my first participation in a Big Bang, and I would like to thank my artist [andromachete](https://andromachete.tumblr.com/) for being such an incredible partner throughout the process! 
> 
> The story that follows contains a blend of historically-accurate details synthesized from a variety of sources, narrative, and strategic creative anachronisms.

* * *

_You know, there was a time when I was worshipped as a god_

* * *

She woke up in the battlefield, in the aftermath.

Blood was underneath and around her, dried to tackiness in the mud left behind by a retreating storm. A mist hung around on the air, cradling her, and the smell of death was thick and repugnant.

There were flies already, around and on the other bodies.

Her first breath in was a spear to the lungs.

 _It is the underworld,_ she thought, _the afterlife, and I am dead. I am a shade. That is why the world seems so grey._

The mud was cold beneath her. It sucked at her hand when she planted it, hesitant and strange. Slowly, methodical, she raised herself to a half-reclined position. The clothes she wore were torn, and stuck to her along with fragments of grass. Her fear rose up, overtook her like a spring bubbling up between stones; for a long time all she could do was cry, sobbing for breath.

She remembered the way her mother’s face had twisted, before her mother gave the order to kill her.

When she had drawn herself together enough to see what lay around her, she registered the signs of people passing, with the horses they had taken. They had come from the direction of the sun’s rising, and among the mud, blood, and bodies she saw a churning path of footsteps, like a river winding away. In some stories death was a river.

She stood, on unsteady legs. Shade that she was, she began to follow. 

* * *

At a distance, she came upon them. Throughout the remainder of the day, the woman who’d called herself _mother_ cleaned her weapon over and over as her gaze picked and darted along the horizon.

Her mother’s mouth was a showy parody of grief, yet her eyes were paranoid and so the shade stayed close to the ground and out of their sight. The watcher heard this woman speak to the others of her daughter, fallen and lost in the chaos of battle, in a voice that ensnared with compelling sincerity. She wove with lies, and they were believed.

 _My daughter would have replaced me one day,_ she said. _I will continue as best I am able, for as long as I must._

Betrayal lodged, bitter and hard, behind the watcher’s breast. Her heart still beat. Her breath plumed like a herd animal’s in front of her face. She thought for an impulse of a moment, crept behind them in pursuit as they moved on. Then, she waited for night to fall like burial.

* * *

Her people would later tell that she appeared like an omen – skin damp, trailing mist behind her, framed by a gout of sudden light from the dung fire. They spoke of the dogs growing restless, eyes rolling, whining softly in the minutes before she emerged from the obsidian darkness surrounding their camp. Her own dog bolted to her, leapt up yipping with joy and returning to heel as she approached. Her eyes glittered. She was naked from the waist up and still had blood smeared over her ribs, along her neck, matted into the tangled, loosened braid down her back.

When her mother and sisters saw her coming thus, they wailed and tore their hair.

Rather than let her accuse or take vengeance upon them, they ran in a panic, bare-foot, and flung themselves into the cold water of the sea, and did not return.

* * *

All of this her people recounted to her as they poured warmed water from earthen jugs over her body. They washed encrusted filth from her, and even she marvelled at the unbroken skin such ministrations revealed. Then, speaking amongst themselves with hushed voices, they left her to her space near a fire.

Wrapped in wool, she couldn’t stop running her hands over herself: the gentle, firm swell of her arms; the corded muscles of her thighs; the tender skin just under her breasts, where the killing spear had entered. Of that wound there was no trace, and her bones were whole. Scars she still had, from old injuries, and ear piercings, but… although there was a memory of agony, she was wholly there, and felt stronger than she had in many cycles of the moon.

Death rested along her skin, sure as the stars laid across the night sky. She could feel it, breathing along with her like it was someone draped around her, like she rested in death’s arms.

She took a stone knife, scrubbed it between her fingers in the still-warmed water until the edge was cleansed. Pressing the point to her palm brought a sharp pain. When she looked next, blood ran down to her wrist. Warm, and vital.

Before her eyes, the puncture shrunk, and closed.

A shocked breath was heard, and she looked up to see a man she recognized. She knew him as someone who was kind, and generous, and fierce when required. The embers of the fire burned lower, and a shiver ran down her spine.

 _When you came back,_ he murmured, _it was as though you stepped from the flames._

He reached forward, brushing a trembling hand against her shoulder. This man’s beard was fresh and he was younger than she, though not by much. There was something reverent in his touch.

 _I died,_ she said, making it real.

_And undying you will lead us._

In the morning she woke, as he slept sated and heavy next to her, and blinked the morning dew from her eyes. She stretched in the golden light of the sun, smiling, and she felt neither pain nor discomfort.

Her people welcomed her home, and the new name they gave her was Āter.

* * *

* * *

It took many years to recognize that the gift granted unto her was of perspective. Āter was fierce – but observant, wise.

It was not that her body ceased to feel. She learned also to listen to it as a signal, and to translate what it spoke of as best she could. For the most part what it said was, _fuck, it hurts to be alive –_ but still, she could learn.

Her chills and aches, however fleeting, could be read as portents of illness and warn the rest to prepare themselves. If they came across a new or unfamiliar food source, she would try some first, always leaving the camps first to be alone so as not to frighten anyone. Sometimes her tongue swelled to choke her throat, or she would see visions and sweat, convulse and wake with a now-familiar start that she knew meant _death_. Alternatively: sweetness, richness, vitality, if it was good to eat; and she could experiment with the limitations of poison and medicine alike. For her deeds she was always given the first bite, and always the meat of the heart: deer, boar, wild fowl.

Yes, there was pain, but it was fleeting – her elemental state felt _unbreakable_. Her axes fell apart and her bowstrings inevitably broke, no matter how well she waxed them, but she was remarkable. Through whatever power made her this way, she could _help_ , and steer her kin and kind away from danger. 

Her tribe did not stay in any place too long, but Āter memorized the signs of grassland grown too wild or unkempt. These she would call to be burned, in order to freshen the soil and prevent wildfires that would scourge the land if the lightning grew hungry. Āter diverted them from water that would make them sick, recognizing signs of pollution in the rivers and streams; foul scents, for instance, or discoloured foams along the banks. They were steadily far-ranging, trading game for cultivated fruit or grain; the latter they charred over the fires, to make the grains last longer in storage. In the winter they drank mares’ milk from the few horses kept and cultivated – created liquor from the milk too, by freezing the liquid and skimming off the ice to make stronger spirits. She developed somewhat of a reputation as a brewmaster, among her many other skills, and they drank libations to her honour and their lives until no one could remember their own name. Āter recognized the patterns in the wild that meant _food,_ and in summer months would seek these sorts of places out: terrain that indicated the presence of herbs; locations where nuts or mushrooms might be found; signs of stag or doe.

She learned things which she might not have had time for previously. In doing so, she got to bear witness to the great exchange of knowledge and craft that makes up human living – the building and shifting ground under any culture. They borrowed the art of salting their meats for a time, but procuring the precious substance grew impractical when they were not near the sea. Other skills kept their usefulness. Her people developed their craft in terracotta and in clay, inspired by the Hamangia. She walked among the Vinča, learning about the symbols they used to speak without words, and their cultivation of various crops. She astonished the Varna - came to them as a sorceress, demonstrating her ability, and asked them to teach her the working of copper and gold. The Khvalynsk people fashioned beads of shell, stone, or animal teeth depending on what they had hunted together, and Āter adorned herself with these. Her people created figures, some in her image, some in the form of animals. The Samara showed how to create a lip on vessels, that they might be slung over the backs of animals on cords for easier carrying. More time passed.

The world seemed to her rich, and full, and she marvelled at the impossibility of so much knowledge and experience; the beautiful ways of living displayed to her, how complex and interconnected everything was. The gift was that she could see it all as clearly as a spiderweb, or the netted stars in their clouds across the night.

Āter celebrated each new birth with her people, each coupling, every newcomer who married in, and even the sending-away of a child to join their lives to other people’s and thus expand the whole of who they were. The song of their history grew in names with each year that passed, until Āter could sing for hours at a time and still not get through the recounting. She was loved, and loved in turn, and her heart waxed and waned in fullness like the moon. She watched as young children became old crones, and some of them remembered her, and fell to their knees before her. This response gave her discomfort and she guided these back to their feet with their hand gripped between hers. As far as any of them knew, she was unchanging, but she didn’t want them looking at her with such hope and expectancy. All that Āter had to offer, she gave. There was nothing else.

She returned to areas visited previously, and the Hamangia were gone, replaced by the Boian. They were not the first, nor were they the last. After countless cycles and many years of absence, she found that Vinča had abandoned their settlements. The Starčevo. The Butmir. The Dnieper-Donets became more attached to farming grains.

Āter mourned, though she could have no relief, and she grieved for what was lost, though none could share in her grief. For it came to pass that she no longer remembered what her family had called itself, all those years ago, and there were none around her who could.

* * *

Her constant joy and comfort was the horses.

She was surrounded by herders and gatherers. In the winter, the horses pawed at the ground to break through the snow. This advantage was held over some of the other livestock kept by neighbouring or settled tribes; they could forage for themselves, and Āter’s tribe was more mobile as a result. As a bonus: horses made good eating, with their abundance of meat and their size.

Forest to their north. Desert to the south, if they travelled far enough. The great sea, and the lesser one; and the great steppe itself, bordered by mountains seen far off in the distance. And all the while, the herds of wild and feral horses roving, embroidering the fields, in counterpoint to the few that she and hers kept more gently. It was a kind of dance of its own, to lead, to follow, to pen in, to let loose for pasture or breeding.

There came a time when it wasn’t possible to remember who had the idea first. Scraps of leather or hempen rope were tied with sinew into coarse bridles. Out of exasperation, and unwilling to lose fingers to the bite of equine teeth, someone had begun to experiment with fittings on the skulls until they could be improved. Āter’s role was to get close enough so someone else could slip the ensemble over the horse’s face. Did the leather slip, and end up in the horse’s mouth? Was the initial discovery an accident? Were they taught the method from someone else, or did they originate it?

No matter how it began, Āter remembers the spring thaw – snow melting away into puddles, the damp smell of the grass, cold fresh air, a grey-blue sky swept over by clouds – and she, running as fast as possible, with her rough apparatus clutched in hand. Her kinspeople ran along behind the horses, driving them into a depression – just a bit of elevated land for her to race alongside their squat, powerful bodies.

The first few attempts were abject failures courting humiliation. The timing was off, or the horse bucked, or the rope slipped, or the sinew shredded at the weakest point. Her arm bone would snap back into alignment and her shoulder into its socket even as she regained her footing and resumed pursuit, adrenaline pumping through her veins, heart thudding with exhilaration. Her quarry cantered, wheeling to rejoin the main body of the herd.

Yet one day, there it was: the leap, the landing, her legs astride the body squeezing inward. And one hand in a horse’s mane, the other looping a bridle into place – the bit lodging atop the tongue, a sudden yank of Āter’s hand making the horse veer off left. She nearly tumbled, but did not fall.

The horse’s eyes rolled; it reared onto its back legs, bucking wildly. She did not fall. When she could not be dislodged, the horse heaved into a gallop. She gripped tight through the coarse, knotted mane. Āter _rode_.

When at last she dropped herself to the ground, her thighs were mottled with fast-fading bruises. Her hair was a wild tangle that took the better part of several hours to comb out, even unto dusk. But for a moment she had _been_ the wind; she’d been the thunder itself, swifter than any projectile, she’d whooped in delight and her call was answered by the others looking on.

She increased her skill; together, all learned. And soon, they were able to keep even larger groups of horses, for they could ride alongside those they wanted to bring into the herd, keeping pace and corralling them in.

* * *

Those were the ways when they were at peace. Āter led them also in times of conflict.

Only once was a raiding group successful in entering her camp. They slit her throat while she slept, claiming she was a demon and that they had slain her with a magic dagger, bewitched to result in her final death. They killed others who’d been awake or keeping watch, and that kindled anger more deeply within her than her own demise. She hunted the raiding group down, each one, and slaughtered them. It could not bring the lost back. Āter sat with that knowledge like a stone inside her, unable to eat or drink for days on end, until at last she rejoined the camp.

After that, Āter ensured that she would not be seen by outsiders in ways that drew attention. Also after, young warriors began to seek her blessing before they engaged in fighting of any kind – whether for prestige, honour, or retribution. They came to her for arbitration, mediation, or absolution. They’d heard the stories of what she’d done, and taken them as a sign of her domain.

Āter did not want this responsibility, or to have the lives of so many laid at her feet. But they needed her, and she had lived so long – surely, she was wise enough to lend her counsel? – and so she patiently heard out stories of self-defence against enemies from other tribes or settlements. Cases of rape, or murder, or jealousy. Even the cases within her own camp. Especially those.

Sometimes, she meted out justice her people could live with.

She’d live with it whether she wanted to or not. 

Conflict grew worse as time crawled on like a glacier advancing over the land. There were years of good crops among the settled peoples, true – but then came a long span of wet, cold years. Lakes spilled over their banks, flooding croplands. There were stories of abandoned dwellings, an upsurge in the number of hunters and fishers competing for resources when the crops rotted on their stalks or grew but did not yield seed. The forests too seemed to wither and diminish – lumber became a scarcity. Horses from their encampment were stolen away. Sometimes they were retrieved; other times, only their picked-clean carcasses. Āter spent more and more time leading her people through battles she did not wish for them to fight, and comforting them if they failed. Negotiations failed. And people fought wherever it seemed the soil was still good, and dark, and fertile…

The man who had loved her that first night of her endless life had taken a wife and had children; and they had children; and his children’s children’s children she watched grow old and wither and pass while she remained the same. By the time the poor years came, knowledge of why she was so attached to them was blighted, and she knew he was at last fully gone. He had been so kind to her, and she had carried the debt. Now she watched his relations turn to shivering twig-boned people from hunger, and they didn’t even know why she cried for them. What could she do against the backdrop of violence, poor weather, and poorer crops, though?

One of his distant descendants, called Pata, was a manipulative bully, a compulsive liar, and cruel. He beat the camp dogs with sticks when no one else could see; one day, one of them bit his little finger off. In the ensuing meeting, Āter ruled that the dogs had taught him a lesson. Pata had never forgiven her for that, nor could she take her eye off him, although for a time he’d been chastened.

In the anxious times they faced, with huge groups sweeping the land out of fear and desperation, Āter could not deny that she needed Pata’s skill with the bow and arrow. Each morning, people of her tribe had to go out riding ahead; and often, warriors did not come back, except for messengers to tell what had occurred. Sometimes, all her riders were forced to shift in their direction like a murmuration of birds, and to flee across the steppes away from a certain massacre. Other horsemen were about, sacking the villages and encampments they came across, and even the skill of her archers could not assure Āter’s victory. Rumblings of discontent spread among her family. Some wanted to fight more than they wanted to continue the way they had, but she would not let them. Even now, she still held veto, even if some cast sidelong glances at her unscarred skin.

One day, Āter went to this man Pata – a boy, really – where he sat drinking at the morning fire with the more raucous of his friends.

 _What is it?_ He squinted at her across the flames. 

_I have heard that you came across a group of scouts._ Her fingers dug into her palms, calling up the pain she’d felt when Pata’s mother clung to them too-tight and begged her to intervene, with bruises around and under her eyes.

 _And what of it?_ He replied, swigging and exchanging sneering glances with his companions, and his posture was lazy and open. 

_They did not wear the clothes or weapons of the ones we have been wary of. You began a battle that did not need to happen – and I’ve heard that you tortured one of the women who rode with them._

_Torture? Is that what those I was with said? I shot her – true – but these are strange times indeed if that is to be considered torture. We were fired upon first. Has anyone disputed this?_

Āter bit her tongue, kept her voice calm. _They said that you laughed at her pain. Shot arrows to kill, but a slow death. Not a merciful one._

 _Mercy?! Corpse-woman,_ the man-boy laughed, _you’d confront me for my methods? I will not defend myself to you, when there is no need._

 _If there’s anyone you owe an explanation to, it would be me. I have led our people since your grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother laid with her husband,_ she heard herself say, gone brittle as poorly-treated clay; she’d expected conflict but not such venom. _Maybe earlier._

He spat at her feet, and cast his drinking horn to the side.

_Is that so? Your body must be full of worms by now, and dust. We will gain a reputation as weak if we do nothing but retreat whenever we encounter strangers on the fields, and strangers will come for us and what wealth we possess. You are a coward. I could do a better job._

_Do you challenge me?_ She replied, turned to cold shale. 

_I do, and when I best you I’ll flay the skin off of you and dance on your bones, and if you come back fleshless you’ll wander the wastes alone! I will be the leader,_ he’d boasted, _and shall bring us to glory._

Despite the twisted, naked glee on his face, she saw echoes of the face of his distant ancestor; and she was broken-hearted, and impossibly old, and so tired.

_So be it._

A circle was cleared for the challenge with the fire kept where the crowd stood; and posted about stood warriors with spears and other weapons who would hold its boundary. Pata brought his favourite dagger, and a corded whip of leather that hissed in the air like a snake when he cracked it. Āter brought no weapons at all. A dread anticipation hung in the air. Eager starvation was in some people’s eyes that had nothing to do with food.

 _Nevermind the wolves, boars, or bears_ , he taunted her, _I will make decorations of_ your _teeth_.

Āter did not answer – merely stood, in a restful pose. Slowly, she extended a palm towards him and beckoned. Her heels ground into the dirt beneath her as she centred, planted herself so that she would not topple on impact.

If there was confusion in his eyes at first, it faded quickly with the red-rimmed narrowing of his eyes. He rushed her, dagger raised.

For the first several blows, she matched him. But he was taller even than her, and her strength flagged as it must. Eventually, reckless abandon won out over her experience. As his dagger plunged into her heart, she cried out, coughed up blood into his face. The last thing she heard were a few scattered screams in the crowd surrounding them. Then the brightness of death.

She woke up on the ground. Someone was weeping, and his friends were chanting his name. Pata was standing above her, faced away with his fists raised above his head; she knocked his legs out from under him with a kick from her own and was on her feet before a yelp left his mouth.

Uncomprehending, he stared up at her, mouth gaping for air like a fish.

 _Stand,_ she said. _We are not done._

Without taking his eyes from her, he staggered upright. She waited, patiently, while he knocked a fist against his sternum to set his breath aright. His friends, stunned silent, began to yell for him.

Once more, he rushed forward, taunted her while his knife slashed across her body. She blocked skillfully, but still his knife caught her arms or legs until she was dizzy and slick with gore, and she fell to her knees. This time, he took her in the throat.

When Āter woke, she rose to her feet, letting each movement have the deliberation of a master tools-maker chipping away at a flint. Pata was heaving for breath, eyes wild with rage, but a shard of fear was embedded in them. Āter took her hand, wiped it across her clavicle, and placed it on his chest without force as she leaned in. 

_Save yourself, Pata,_ she murmured so that only he could hear. _The dogs you hurt took a finger and I would take more, but there might still be a place for you somewhere. Take those who would follow you, and leave. I would give you a few days start and not harm you unless we crossed paths. It is more than you’d get elsewhere._

She lifted her hand away. Where she’d pressed was a handprint of blood.

His face turned downwards to look where she’d touched him, and up. _Monster,_ he spat, _the world moves on. I’ll return you to god’s decaying body._

His whip cracked forward, and struck her in the hand.

Āter allowed him to kill her three more times. Each, he made a display of, trying to rally the crowd against her and for him, although his chest soon heaved and he lost the easy grace with which he’d moved at the start. Now he trembled; the arc of his swings clumsy and graceless. With each kill, those who supported him grew quieter, and the onlookers more disturbed. Several had fled, or fallen onto their faces rather than look on at what he was doing. A sour, pleading note entered his voice as he called towards them to come back, to witness. At the back of the crowd, she linked her eyes to those of Pata’s mother, hands clasped to her mouth; but these she lowered, and nodded, before turning her back on the scene.

By now they were both covered in her blood, and still Āter rose before him. His green eyes were luminous in their sockets, and she thought of another man who’d reached out for her, and not with violence. Pata held no trace of that man beyond appearance. He was right: the world moved, and Āter felt something collapse within her, stratified and shattered and pinned down under the weight of so many years.

In her mind, Āter heard a far-off echo – _undying, you will lead us_ – and she moved without thought.

First, she knocked away the dagger. Next, his whip, which she let encircle her arm; she wrapped it up tight and jerked it away, drawing them both in closer to the fire at their backs. Unnerved, he swung wildly. She ducked under his fist, grabbing a handful of burning matter, from the center where the flame was hottest.

These she flung into his face.

Screaming, scrabbling at his eyes, Pata was easy to incapacitate. Āter subdued him with one sharp move, and pinned him underneath her weight. His legs she forced to kneeling, and used the whip to wrench his arms back, and locked his neck in her elbow. Pata’s breath whistled out of his nose, but he could not speak; she would not let his jaw move except to whimper and whine in agony.

Almost serene, she looked up at the remaining witnesses. The burnt flesh on her hands grew back. It itched, slightly.

_You have seen what happened here today. Pata’s crime is not ambition. It is short-sighted cruelty. He revels in the pain of others. His crime is not his challenge to me. I welcome the possibility that others might lead better than I, and no one understands more that I am not made in the same ways as you. But this man?_

And she gestured to the man she held immobile.

_He would not lead you. He would rend you all if it suited his whim. He would treat you with contempt, and have you believing you deserved it. Pata would squander all our alliances, waste the neutrality of those who neither harm nor help us, and he would lead us into ruin. This is not who we are. We kill when we must to sustain our own lives, and we respond only to the threats that matter without creating others. The others, we move around like fire, or water. You’ve seen the empty settlements, the bodies of their inhabitants. The world we know is dying, declining. Would you speed that death as he would?_

Āter saw the men he had sat with trying to flee and nodded towards them. _Stop them._

All of her people surged, and soon all of his were captured.

Pata struggled in her arms and gasped, _I curse you_ , before she was able to suppress him.

 _I am sorry,_ she said, looking him directly in the eye, _that I could not save you_.

And Āter broke his neck. 

There was no pleasure as she dispatched the others.

Āter sent the rest away, and sat on the ground, and wept like the cloudbursts that so plagued them. Her ruined clothes she stripped off, folded among dried cakes of dung that she piled high, and burned. She fetched ice-cold water, and cleaned herself with it until she was raw and shivering, struck herself with a hazel branch and then wrapped herself in blankets. When done, she turned and saw a small core of people watching her. Carried in their arms were woven cloths, and containers of food or liquor, and a new set of leggings embroidered with rich patterning, and a tunic.

One by one, they all fell prostrate before her.

Looking out over them, she sensed something had shifted – though she did not yet know what.

But when wars came soon after, she held council with them and was listened to. Death outside the camps. Death within, as a last resort, through combat. She studied. Fought with more bravery, less fear, a greater willingness to take fatal blows to save others. She gritted her teeth through the pain and thought of what she owed them, and rose to her feet even when the ability seemed beyond her. It never was. It should have been.

Pata’s mother had left and was not seen again.


	2. Chapter 2

They called her a goddess.

Fire, battle, arbitration, regeneration. Āter grew accustomed to worship, and eventually she even found it comfortable. Much of what seemed to make her people happy involved the fashioning of jewelry and icons out of precious metals; the sacrifice of animals and sharing in their flesh; some truly decadent meals; and occasionally, sex.

Blood was tied to life, that much she was certain of, and a rhythm of cycles could predict whether there might be children. Although she had not bled herself for countless seasons, since her first death, Āter paid attention; and she encouraged her people to have certain kinds of sex in the summer so that children would arrive in spring when food was easier to get. A recommendation, not a requirement. Āter would hang her quiver at the door of her yurt to indicate when she needed to be left alone to enjoy her own pleasure. There were a handful of those she was closest to, who called themselves her priests and priestesses, and she trusted them enough to let them into her bed.

One of them had hair the deep colour of honey, eyes blue as flax flowers, and tattoos pricked into her arms to cover lines scratched in from when she tamed her hunting eagle. They showed wild birds, wolves, and spiralling shapes to depict the wind. Her name was Khasa. She had more kindness than Āter knew what to do with. Her legs grew more bowed with each season spent on the horse, and she accumulated so many scars that her skin was a map of them. Āter could spend an evening tracing them one by one until Khasa’s breath grew short with wanting, and Āter loved her for all of that. Inner strength was matched to Khasa’s outer – she could calm herself to draw impossible shots on her bow, and heave massive bundles upon her back when called to. Her years she wore with all the dignity of a golden headdress, and she was Āter’s favourite if not her only.

At meetings to decide the direction they would go, or what actions to take in response to unrest, or whether to embark on a raid, Khasa listened. Āter was expected to have the final word, and she would always consult with her followers before doing so. On this the tribe insisted: that Āter might use her wisdom to deliberate.

The rituals bored her sometimes, but she had to recognize their utility; if the talks had not gone well it did give her time to become still. Khasa often heard what was being said with people’s emotions, not their words, and what needs were unexpressed or subtly concealed. These she unearthed and made more obvious.

_Our tribe’s offshoot grow frightened because they cannot leave their dwellings behind,_ Khasa might say, _but the grassland fails, and they are tethered to their cattle, their horses, who cannot be ranged out to eat any further than they already are. They fear the herd will die._

Āter might suggest a sacrifice of a certain number of horses or cattle – to the gods, of course, and that fewer acres of grassland would be depleted and might have time to recover. A feast would be held, and the settled peoples would eat roasted flesh and dedicate the proceedings to the coming year, and within a turning or two of the seasons the region would rebalance. If it did not work, Āter would say that the land was not satisfied, and suggest they move on for a short time. She told stories of the lean, cold years of near-famine if ever they did not listen.

Or Khasa might say: _they are all tired of one another’s company and have devolved into petty squabbling. How often have we seen as much?_

For these, Āter might prescribe a purifying sauna – the stacking of rocks, heated in the fire, in a dwelling hung about with skins to keep the heat inside; then, water poured over the rocks, and all those within stripped down to let the steam curl against their bodies. Between this and some wrestling or fucking, usually the issues could be resolved. The same could be said for her own grumblings and restlessness; in this regard, Āter felt very fond of and similar to the humans she walked among.

On an evening when the sky was deep and fathomless with stars, Khasa rubbed pungent, invigorating oil from the plant called _halinda_ into Āter’s shoulders. Her gold jewelry was already stripped from her arms, neck, and ears; her headdress, with its floral and curling designs, rested next to her sleeping area. When Āter was humming in delight, Khasa stripped down to her waist to allow Āter reciprocity, as was their rite. Āter tossed a handful of dried herbs and flowering tops, looking tangled and mossy, onto their yurt fire. The smoke she breathed in relaxed her, made her head heavy and tranquil, and she lifted Khasa’s braid over her shoulder. By now it was threaded through with silver, and there were spots along her back. Touch relieved pain, Āter knew, and Khasa had much of it these days. The herb helped with that too.

Oiled, her hands slid across the expanse of Khasa’s shoulders and back; firelight gleamed along her, turned her to gold. Āter hummed under her breath, the colours of the woven cloth around her brightened and blurred at once.

_A pretty melody,_ Khasa murmured after a time.

_Once, I invented the words to it._

_What was the song?_

_Our history._ She traced lazy spirals into Khasa’s back, like the loops of the rivers she’d watched grow from streams. _I have changed the lyrics so many times. But the tune is the same._

_You never sing it anymore?_

Āter considered for a while. _Other things occupy me,_ she said at last, tongue thick in her mouth, because that was at least true. She drew another breath, deep, and felt a warm haze settle into place over the disquieted ripple in her mind. The new stories were more interesting anyways, and did not involve bygone famines or betrayals.

Quiet fell. Khasa groaned her approval, which Āter thought meant she was safe.

Khasa turned, then, and faced Āter.

_I would pray you to remember for us, when we are gone._

_That is easy,_ Āter began, but Khasa lowered her face to the floor and struck it three times with her hands.

_I would pray you to remember us in full, and never forget who we are – preserve us, and what we have done, and where we left traces, and bear it with you as you ride towards eternity. What we own is destroyed in our death, or buried with us, and even stone wears away. Carry us in your mind and breath._

_Are you speaking of the peoples west, who kill their dwellings every other generation? They are settled people, and that is their own custom…_

No reply came.

_What you want would cost a great deal more sacrifice than we can pledge,_ Āter laughed uneasily. _My life thunders on, but my memory is not limitless._

_Will you not even reflect on my prayer? I would kill my eagle and horse, both of whom are well-learned –_

_No,_ Āter said sharply, and Khasa faltered. _Ask me for something else. I would fight a raiding party alone; walk through flames; I would swim to the bottom of a lake for you, or retreat to the icefields. I would help you transcend the bounds of your body if you let me, as many times as you wanted, or sing you a song of your prowess! Let me tell tales of how swift our horses, or skilled our warriors, or brave our mothers. But something must be lost to make room for the new. Change is inevitable. I can’t… preserve things the way that you ask._

_I would offer you my own heart’s blood, if it would make it possible –_

_Stop!_

Khasa halted, mouth trembling with protest like water on the lip of a jar, but she obeyed. Āter steadied herself.

_What’s bringing this on?_

Khasa’s fingers found Āter’s bare ankle, and worried there with smooth motions. Her people only grasped at her feet when they _really_ wanted something from her, and each time she wondered: would it be in her power to give? Though from how Khasa spoke this had been on her mind for some time, the phrasing rehearsed.

_I have known you since I was young, and you’ve always listened. Would you hear me now – not as your priestess, just as a woman?_

_Of course,_ Āter replied, already regretting the decision.

_These steppes are far too full,_ Khasa whispered. _Nowhere we go is untouched by trade routes, and strangers with their transports. You’ve seen the settlements of thousands, packed together closer than a beehive, and with beasts let loose to roam without being kept clean._ _They contain marvels, yes, but also… I fear we doom ourselves. That we overreach._

_Would you undo all the good this evening has done for us?_ Āter complained.

_I’m old, Āter. You speak of one time the world ended; I dream of another. When I die, bury me with my eagle and my bow._

For the first time, Āter looked into Khasa’s eyes and saw exhausted fear she’d never registered before, and she was moved with pity. All her loves and followers died eventually. Somehow she’d thought Khasa immune to… all that. But she was only human.

_I don’t want to talk about that,_ Āter said, nudging along Khasa’s ear. _Fine; I will carry you, and all of us, for cycles and cycles, and I promise I will sing you into being. There will be no death of our house as long as I remake you. You will stay with me. I will share myself with you as I ever have. If I am your goddess I will make it so._

With relief and gratitude, Khasa sighed. Her mouth quirked, and Āter knew she was forgiven, but her own spit tasted resinous and sour in her mouth. The smoke writhing through the yurt seemed to caress them both: promises, promises, it whispered.

A funny little smile at the side of Khasa’s mouth, she asked: _And do you know what you are the goddess of, yet?_

An old question between them, one that Khasa had seduced her with once upon a time – the brazenness had led to a tussle, and then once she was beaten, to Khasa on her knees, with her then-young hands skimming up the taut strength of Āter’s thighs…

But now, Āter could not answer. She deflected, _right now I am the goddess of your pleasure, if you’d have me._

Khasa would.

* * *

* * *

In the afterglow, she laid awake for hours as Khasa snored beside her, until the misty grey of dawn arrived for them, and the sun pulled itself laboriously into the sky as though it couldn’t be bothered with the effort.

In that time she remembered a river bed she’d come across, one where some impossible storm had sheared away the banks. A great slice of land was exposed to the air, with the roots of grasses like hair tangling soil together, but some god of the sky saw fit to lay bare the bones of the earth. Āter had sat there for ages, staring at old arrowheads and the evidence of decay – the upper layers first sun-baked and wind-scoured, then bands of darker soil, next stones and flecks of ashy soil, with the lowermost layers thin and compressed under the weight of those above. The grass bound everything together so that not all could erode away and crumble wetly into the moving hungry waters, but still…

Memory was like that. By now she had forgotten even how much she’d forgotten. Some actions came to her unconscious – or she retained knowledge of _how_ , but not _why_.

What her people asked of her was that she listen, which was easy now to do since anything they could say to her was a variation on a theme; and that she decide things for them, which at most involved a few days or weeks of reflection. At other times, in crisis, a snap judgment would do.

Āter saw herself for an instant overlooking the whole of the land they travelled on, and the many cultures swirling and eddying together like currents. All their foolishness and wisdom commingled, sometimes, but water endured! It didn’t simply _stop flowing_.

Khasa was tired, Āter decided. And superstitious. She was seeing omens and portents where none existed; if they steered clear of the mega-settlements for long enough, whatever visuals and experiences had so terrified her favourite priestess would discolour and erode.

So resolved, Āter kissed Khasa as she slept and went out to hunt a meal they could share. If read as a seal to the covenant, so be it; as for Āter, she was merely hungry.

* * *

In the end, the cities with their circling structure and winding roads were something to be afraid of after all. In her despair, the only comfort Āter could take was that Khasa had died of age before her dreams could rightly be called prophetic.

Not weather, or marauders. Death arrived as a sickness, a great scything fever, and its reign lasted too many years to count. It would ebb back, lull Āter into a false sense of relief, then resurge. 

The worst part was that, at first, Āter thought it a familiar tightness that banded her lungs, arrowheads lodged in her throat, nothing so unfamiliar that it should spark worry.

They arrived at the rangelands of distant cousins to find their numbers reduced by half.

Horribly, she knew what had happened, but had to see for herself.

Sure enough, when she arrived in one of the largest cities she found it abandoned by the healthy, full of the dead. Āter piled bodies high, sealed them underground beneath mounds of clay that she carted in her hands from the river, dizzy with her own fever. She sent everyone away so they wouldn’t be contaminated. Her body slowly swelled with black nodes, which then vanished overnight after they’d progressed. Elsewise she could not keep food down. She waited for the moon to wax and wane a full cycle before returning. When they asked her what she’d seen, Āter could only shake her head. They moved on.

The other cities were the same, and in between, long stretches of land. People fleeing were sometimes sick themselves, until they weren’t. She lost track of the times that she died – not from the sickness itself but from carelessness. It was impossible to keep her thoughts straight. Exposure took her. Then a fall. A burial mound collapsed on her while she was inside it, making it, and she had to claw her way out from the suffocating earth. This too her family lauded as a sign; _the earth spat her back out_ , they said, and more than once she had to tear herself away from their need, to howl into the cracked-bowl of the sky until she was retching and stopped feeling mad. Āter existed somewhere beside herself, numb as frostbite. There was only the work.

Even then, the bodies with their ulcers and filth needed tending to. Her people praised her as they cowered in their yurts, waiting to be next. Only she could bear it, they said, and who was she to deny them? No song in her brain after all; just a long scream, an ache that would not go away.

_Am I then the goddess of pestilence?!_ She shrieked into a thunderstorm one night, as the wind and icy rain lashed the tears from her face, but she got no response.

She sent her people to the base of the mountains – the soft, rolling mountains just north of the deserts – and told them to wait for her there, and not to travel beyond a set of visuals she outlined for them: _circumscribe this region_ , she said, _this region only, do you understand? And do not go beyond it, and I will come for you when this has passed. Count the years. Etch them into clay, or a damn bone if you can’t make pottery. Only do not forget me and I will not forget you._

She watched them go with their horses, with a few harnessed to pull along wagons or sleds for those who could not ride.

Plague was everywhere.

She could not track it. Merely follow in its wake, attempt to instruct survivors, return later to find that they were no longer alive, repeat the exercise, scan from one village to town to city to the next, plod onward, not sleep, for the usual causes of death did not cease making their claims just because there was an omnipresent illness; her vigilance saved her once from a boar and killed her after a week of remaining awake another time, so really, who was she to know what the right course of action was?

Plague wheeled around, cavorted through the air, the water, she was not sure, the soil – nothing helped, naught cured it, just death and death for everyone _except her_. She burned her clothing time and again, cut off all her hair so that it would not get in her way as she worked. Muscles burned and ached and reset; she was so weak, until she wasn’t.

For her a set of years was like a myriad of days, and in this she watched as certain cities she knew emptied and drained of life. They were re-settled by hopefuls who wanted to escape the harsh work of the fields, and corral their cattle, and these too died in time.

A few stuttering, spurting starts of people attempting to venture out. Humanity held on like a shuddering breath, in, and then released…

So much was lost.

Then the quiet.


	3. Chapter 3

The quiet.

She came across broken tools and wheels and toys and small etchings in clay that might have been someone’s name, except she could not read them and knew no one alive with a tongue that could speak wisdom to her. All of them, scattered into the dust, and sometimes she buried them. Āter wept in the ruins of places she’d once been, and burned the houses, and couldn’t figure out how to pray as the smoke rose up. She watched as the mud-daub turned to burnished clay, and cracked, and fell to pieces in the fragments of home-soul left behind. She hoped she hadn’t left any stray belongings to linger. The inhabitants were dead and so were the houses, so she burned them hoping they wouldn’t become inhabited by something worse. Every room a gaping mouth, a rictus, begging a resurrection she couldn’t grant.

It occurred to her as she did this that she didn’t know their rites, or the proper words to say, or gestures, or sacrifice; and anyways, who was she to play at traditions she understood the least thing about?

_I am sorry,_ she muttered to the smouldering ash and ember in front of her. _There’s just one of me and I cannot…_

She wasn’t sure what she couldn’t do. Read people’s minds. No omnipotence. Only the places where she was, and where she wasn’t. What she knew and didn’t know. Half-present. See-through. How cruel that the sun was up, and golden, and would not let her hide; that the world was so green, and the insects chimed and buzzed throughout the grasses surrounding her.

_I cannot die,_ Āter finished at last, bitterly, and sat until it was dark.

She was there for a very long time.

* * *

After such an experience it took some time before she could bring herself close to any gathering of humans. What if the sickness slept within her? She was lonely but even that could not kill her. She imagined her people, safe without her, and held herself still.

Then one day, near a river, she found some terrace farmers with bronze cheekpieces on their oxen. They rested hands on their swords as she approached, but relaxed when she held her hands forward to show that she bore no weapons or ill intent.

_Are you a steppe woman, then? So far from home!_

_People scatter. Would you share your meal?_

Some spirits relaxed them, though at first they were rigid and vigilant. Over dinner they prattled on about trade, omens, myths and tales of warriors, idle gossip from within their extended families – who had married whom, what scandals involved children or cousins. She sat far away, on the other side of the fire, with a careful imagined distance between herself and any of their bodies. At last she broke into their conversation, a lively but shallow discussion about the plans they had once they returned to Maikop.

_Impossible to think any place flourishes given what has happened. Two – three generations gone by?_

_Is it so?_

She slowly lowered her fingers, covered in grease, from her mouth. _Have you not heard of the sickness? The settlements – they are all empty and scoured, I burned them myself…_

They thought her mad, she knew, for who would be travelling _alone_ and claim such things? It would be the work of a village, at least.

_Surely you must be mistaken; tradespeople came with their goods only two cycles ago! Do you mean some other cities? We speak of the ones behind the mountains to the south, whose height is kissed by the sun as it slides across the sky like a gold bead… the great ones?_

_Were they not also destroyed?_

From the looks on their faces, she could tell that they now _truly_ believed her mad.

_You mean the Sumerians? Whoever could destroy what they have built?_ They laughed in startled pity. _Or the temples or the ensi? Strange that you would think such a thing possible!_

_You don’t know all that is possible,_ she retorted.

They relented without giving ground, which she guessed was to end the conversation. _Maybe so._

She turned her face towards the meal they were providing, but the meat now just tasted of blood. Afterwards, she began to gather her things to take her leave. For a while they shuffled their feet awkwardly in the dirt, while she straightened up. 

_Would you like to come with us?_ They offered with great kindness. 

_No,_ she replied, and the frazzled relief etched on their faces left her without satisfaction. 

* * *

Sometimes she dreamed, as she traveled: that the restless dead followed behind her, and she ignored them as best she could. All the broken pottery shards clattering together like teeth in winter, the rolling stones, great slithering trails of tools and decaying skins and bits of precious metal twisted beyond use or recognition. Most of it stretching back into the bloody mist she walked away from, a heaving grinding mass.

But the sound grew. The chattering and clamour would increase until Āter could bear neither it nor the clammy rattling sensation around her ankles, and her dream-self would look down.

She would see a skeleton, boney fingers clasped tight around her ankles, dragging in the dust behind her, and its jaw would open to speak –

Āter felt her heart stop on waking, more than once, but never for the last time even when she begged that it would be.

* * *

In the bowl of the earth: her people were not where she left them.

It took days to confirm this was the case, and for a time Āter imagined that they were just barely ahead of her. Perhaps she followed them, or they followed her, in a dizzying game like the ones the camp dogs used to like to play with the children around a fire… only she didn’t find it funny now.

Surely there had to be a mistake. Here: the faintest tracing of a divot in the ground, where an encampment might have been placed. And there! The signs of a fire pit, grown over by now and concealed by hastily piled branches, but still…

Āter found a pile of bones, stacked, and with nicks along the exterior from blades. Her heart seized up with horror in her throat until she saw the hooves – _horses,_ she thought in sickened swooping relief, _of course, just horses,_ she hoped. They were charred, smudged over. But even the horses they’d eaten, they would bury – the exposure of their bones was troubling. Soon she would wonder why they had been treated thus, with no kind of proper reverence, but that question was for later.

Like a vulture wheeling through the area, she widened the circle of her search. Feared the lack of an answer. Asked her silent, absent divine family to help her. Whoever they were. Still nothing.

It came to pass that she arrived back at a spot she _knew_ she’d been to before, and Āter flung herself to the ground in anger; crossed her legs in front of her.

She thought until her head ached behind her eyes, and it didn’t do her much good.

The shadows elongated, the day grew murky with chill twilight as the sun passed behind the mountains, and bugs harangued her. Āter lit a small fire, shielded just under flat stones, and thought some more. Or tried to. Her stomach yowled. She fed it some dried fish, oily and fragrant. Just because she wouldn’t _die_ of hunger didn’t mean she enjoyed the sensation.

In the morning she gathered her things, tightened the blankets across her mount’s back, brushed out his flanks and mane, and vaulted up into the place ready for her.

Before she was a warrior goddess, she was a hunter.

* * *

The details became what most engrossed her.

After about another week of tending to her form and regaining her bearings, Āter retraced her steps to the pile of horse bones. She examined them as closely as possible. The grass had time to recolonize the area with tender shoots, and the bones were sun-bleached, and insect picked. One part of the stack had collapsed, gnawed on by some creature that cracked a few open to get at the marrow. But the ones lower down in the pile seemed older than those on top. This was a place which someone returned to.

She scanned around her and chose to seek the higher ground.

Behind her was a mountain range, bracketing in the steppe like a hand. It took the better part of a day to scale the nearest one, the thrust of its body. She left her horse at the base and paused from time to time to pour out some liquor to splash on her path. This for her long-lost childhood. This to beg safe passage. This for the interval of the sun’s climb into the sky, for the far-away brazen ember of its being. This for the years she kindled inside her.

At the summit, she looked about her and bared her chest to the sky. Sure, she thought, there might be some symmetry between the images here: mountain-goddess below, herself up high like a beacon. Mostly she was sweaty, and this was the quickest way to cool off in the bracing chill of the peak. At this height, her lungs struggled for air.

But from here she could see the great carved out sweep of the steppe angling away from her, reaching like a splayed hand into the mountains.

A day’s travel or so away was the shadow of a herd, shifting slowly across the plain like meditation. Āter wished to shoot herself like an arrow, to arc into the sky and come down in their midst.

But she had no wings, and the sky had no interest in flinging her to meet her destination.

So, she ran down the mountain – almost died once, skidding down a scree face and into a dense thicket of shrubbery – and when she felt like vomiting from the stitch in her side, proceeded to walk. 

* * *

The walking continued so that she would not appear desperate to them on her arrival or exhaust her horse. Who else could it be but them? And after so long, it wouldn’t make a grand entrance for Āter to appear dishevelled and perspiring, so she washed herself a bit in a stream. From a small satchel, she took out a few thin bands of gold and slipped them up her arms. They were all that remained of her former indulgences, but impressions mattered. The face looking back at her in the water didn’t look particularly divine – a slight hollow around her eyes, tightness to her jaw, a furrow between her brow that she couldn’t make smooth out for very long before it firmly re-established itself there.

_What are you so worried about?_ She slapped her cheeks, calling up a bit of colour to them.

Her spine was so straight as she rode in, Āter could feel a twanging stiffness setting up in her shoulders and middle back. She tried to force a smile, but felt it setting up strangely; when she relented, her face settled into the grim expression it preferred right now.

The horses she’d seen from the mountain announced her arrival with whickering and soft whinnies, their handsome bulk shifting away from this woman on her horse.

It was some time before she came upon any people, and they stood as though senseless, eyes widened or face buckled, and gave her a huge berth. She sensed them falling in behind her and rolled her shoulders back.

At last the mounds of their yurts drew up in her line of sight, heavy fabrics and leathers bowing the springy wooden poles. More people emerged, one at a time. She couldn’t recognize any of them. Had she really been away so long? A child pushed to the front of the meagre crowd, with a bright strip of reddish clay smeared down over the forehead and nose and lips; and his eyes widened, and he took off running with his gangling limbs flinging up grass-dust and dirt behind them under his pounding feet.

She waited some more, holding herself rigid with anticipation, drawn back too far and in danger of dry-firing.

In the child’s tow was an ancient man, bowed in his spine. Her breath caught up to look at him, for he was spangled and draped about with loops of bone and teeth strung onto fibre cord – the richness of the hunts that must have contributed towards his adornment staggered her. At intervals, some were dyed red, or dappled pale indigo, or an ochre hue. When he saw her, he fell to his knees and unwound the loops, one at a time.

_We kept your years,_ he at last said when all was laid before her. _As was required._

They looked at her expectantly.

Many words wrestled and fought within her, aiming to be the victor. Āter thought about laughing until she cried, crying until she was sick; about cavorting wildly with them around a fire in a benevolent celebration. She wanted to wring from them stories of their survival and bravery, like water from a cloth, until she knew what they knew. Āter wanted to praise them for their resilience and fortitude, ask for the names of the mothers in camp and who was born of whom, and what the fuck had happened?

She opened her mouth.

They leaned in, a great inhale of shifting bodies.

_Do you have any idea how long it took me to trace you?_ She snapped, _or how long I’ve had to search? I told you to stay put!_

In the aftermath of her outburst she looked again, to see they had flinched away from her. All except the old man.

His eyes crinkled and filled with tears.

_It is you,_ he sobbed around his smile, _and we waited and did not forget you._

* * *

_You found the pyre,_ the camp’s wise people said that night around a secret fire in the yurt cleared out for her. 

_Is_ that _what it was?_

_The pyre for the offering._

_Offering to whom?_

_Who else?_ They asked, though their eyes darted about not meeting hers.

_I am not jealous._

_We do not fear_ your _jealousy; that we carry close to us as our own hearts, for we are your people and we knew you would understand. We are not known to these other gods and want only for them to keep away from us – an offering, an offending, what’s the difference? The world is gone. We are shades and were left to wander. We have done the best we could._

_What of the cities nearby? The villages?_

_Ah, the cities, ah, the villages…_ They made sad gestures she did not understand. _We dared not go near them. They were full of,_ and they said a word she did not recognize, _and their lungs were rotted within them. Oh Āter goddess ours, we waited so long!_

_Tell me._

They did. She listened long into the night, and some of the older keepers fell asleep where they sat, their chins nodding and drooping towards their chests. They spoke in shifts. As one faded another would take up the telling.

They spoke of finding places that turned them away, threatened with spears and arrows and blades at the door. Many other peoples in migration were openly hostile. There were battles, sometimes, and they were won or they were lost and either way it meant more bodies. Strangers were tired or afraid or sometimes hauntingly glad to see another living being. These, who’d once been her people and might be again, told her about others who cared and offered grain, or married in, or welcomed those who wished to leave. How the mares stopped giving milk during one horrible span of months; these they ate. The horses in the camp now were recent additions; the others had to be consumed or sacrificed either to the gods or to be laid down with the honorable dead. They also ate climbing, short-haired things and snakes and eggs and fish.

Life went on, despite the landscape and certain absences of food or tools or familiar touchstones of season or harvest or forage. Āter heard and wept and smiled for the generations gone by: only 5. She had expected more but hoped for less. At last there was only one question left, one she had waited for with growing unease.

_What of my priests, my priestesses, the others?_

_Oh. When the food was gone, and the horses dead, they gave of themselves first._ And he lay a hand across his lower belly, which Āter stared at.

_Ah._

_A symbol of your promise. Now that you are here, it is unnecessary._

She recognized the look on the speakers’ face: it was a request for approval. She nodded, once, controlling herself, and the keepers seemed satisfied.

When it was done, she staggered away from the camp and lost the inadequate contents of her stomach.


	4. Chapter 4

They had much to relearn. The first problem was her absence; the second was the loss of other leadership in the camp, of discontinuity. There were imperfections in their use of the bow, for instance. And strange alterations in their craft and handiworks. Āter tried to correct them in their arrow fletching, or in how they napped their stone into blades, and they stared at her with blank amusement.

 _But here is the changed method,_ they explained gently, _for the new stone,_ and she felt stupid and outdated. They had bronze, too, and either genuinely didn’t recall where or whom they had gotten it from, or were concealing its origins from her. Someone, somewhere, had a furnace with which to work metal. She thought again of the laughing tradespeople, their words of the cities beyond the mountains. Eridu. Ur.

Like worked clay that shattered if left near the fire to heat unevenly, Āter found that her temper flared often, and that her people sought to mollify her. For her pleasure, of course. She had no way to articulate to them that it wasn’t her pleasure and ease that she wanted; it was to be necessary and slip easily back into their ranks. In the old days she would retreat in order to compose her thoughts and render a steady judgment; now, sometimes they requested leave of her to interpret something she’d said, or a gesture made. This rankled. There was no need for false distance between her and them. They could just _ask._

Āter was not used to having her presence merely _tolerated._ But although she had returned to the arrangement with no small relief, it never seemed to satisfy; they were waiting for something, and she couldn’t tell what.

* * *

In time the source of their restlessness became clear. One day those who had appointed themselves keeper of her ways and rites came to her. They were holding the long ropes of teeth – the colours denoted spans of years counted out meticulously – gold, and fine-worked weapons, and she could smell the eager hope in their sweat. They reeked of sauna. The leader’s pupils were blown.

_You have restored us, after five long generations._

_You did so yourself,_ she replied, discomfited.

_Are you displeased with us?_

_Only sometimes – and never for long._

_Then we must work harder for your gracious favour…_

_It’s not a matter of working harder,_ Āter said in frustration, _I only want you to act like I should not be set apart!_

_Really?_

_Of course. I came from you, and now I am home—_

_This is a great relief!_

_Is it?_

_Yes – to hear you say such words! Truly we are worthy at last of your promise!_

_As it was foretold,_ another said.

Āter felt dread, like a splash of winter rain against her heart.

_What promise?_

_The one you made to she-who-heads-a-council, Khasa who carried your words! Your promise to make us like you._

_I did no such—_ Āter began, but they broke over her with their eagerness.

_And she said: I will carry you for cycles and cycles—_

Her own words delivered back to her, a reeling lifetime later. Not perfect, fragmented, splintered into something stranger than she had meant, when she spoke in careless love. Their recitation was precise, flowing, terrible and beautiful, a dreamy cadence. They finished:

_I will share myself with you as I ever have, blood of my lifeblood and heart of my heart. If I am your goddess I will make it so._

* * *

_You’re right,_ she capitulated through numb lips. _Of course. But –_ she swallowed – _the ways are strange and incomplete. I would need time, to perfect the rites._

_Then let us help you!_

_You cannot – it… it has to take you by surprise,_ Āter said. She knew enough to watch their faces fall in disappointment.

 _Of course,_ their leader at last said, his fingers wrung together. _We only ask that you do not make us wait longer, for already I feel death crawling towards me._

Though she did not want to, she leaned in and pressed her lips dryly to his forehead. _For love and pity…_ she began to say but could not finish. Instead, she looked around her and asked, _may I sing you a song?_

None but her could know that the melody had changed, but they closed their eyes in rapture nonetheless to hear it. The lyrics weren’t the same, but she kept the message.

It was a desperate ploy. If they could remember what she had said for so long, she hoped, they would remember these instructions, their history, who they were; one day she hoped they could forgive her. The last notes died soft on her lips.

She dismissed them soon after.

* * *

Coward that she was, Āter took her horse and prepared to ride out from camp that same night. What she felt was unlike panic, although her heart thudded in her ears and what her eyes saw was over-bright and over-close.

Only, as she was about to leave, an instinct made her glance to the side. In faint glimmers of the night fire, she saw the child with the clay stripe down their forehead looking at her. He had his head cocked curiously to one side, fingers gripping the side of a fresh-woven cloth hung up to stretch out the grain of its fibres.

 _Have you broken with us?_ He asked mildly.

After she swallowed, she said, _if I were going to, would you come with me?_

The child shook his head.

Her breath felt like a spear to the lungs.

 _I will be back by the dawn,_ she promised, _when that goddess does her work and the moon pulls himself down._

And she was. She did return. But not before, as a consolation prize to herself, she had taken down and buried the bone pile, cursing out whatever god her people felt the need to appease the whole while. Cursing out Khasa, who shared words that were only meant for the two of them – and then she took it back, because Khasa had died, and the world had ended, and her people needed an image of her more than the reality, and she never should have come back to find them.

* * *

Some in the camp seemed discomfited by the news spreading: that the time of fulfilment was at hand. They shook their heads almost imperceptibly during meetings, or held to the edges of crowds. Āter noticed these individuals. She spoke with one, who wore their hair long. They were busy pricking tattoos along their chest, concentric circles, soft curving designs. 

_Tell me what happened._

_You already know,_ they said, tugging on their beard and not meeting her eyes. She saw the dip of the needle, the rub of charcoal dust.

_I know one version. There must be others._

_You must understand,_ they said in turn. _I was a child, born after the worst began. My mother said the true keepers held through her own mother’s time; but that when she reached her tenth summer, there was an argument. A fight – factions. Some who had come to believe you would restore us by making us like you, who wanted to rewrite… certain things by claiming they had spiritual meaning, that they had not happened because we were cold and starving. A second faction believed we’d been abandoned, and wanted to strike out east. Some of their number made it out. And the third, who wanted to abide – to wait, and defer certain judgments until you had arrived._

_And?_

They shrugged. _At the last, only one remained. It had been hard seasons. They were desperate to form new meaning._

_Why do you not head out yourself? With any who would join you?_

They looked towards some children, playing near a yurt with toys carved from wood. Āter saw them too, heard their laughter from afar.

 _I am responsible,_ they said quietly. _Many rely on me who cannot care for themselves. Besides – if we were caught…_

The bone needle caught; they hissed, and lifted blood up to their lips on a finger.

_If you stay, they may eventually listen to reason._

She sat with them, in silence.

* * *

Stalling only held off the inevitable so long. The keepers believed her to be sincere in her intent when she began long, drawn out preparations: setting out bowls of salt water to gather up the fire from the sun; fletching arrows and spears and anointing them with her own blood as a blessing. Of course people died in the interim years and she held a feast for every single one of them, buried their bodies herself with gold and weapons and beasts, and built up the kurgans atop their curled-up forms. They rebuilt the herd, slowly, Āter calming the first horses brought into the fold – the rest soon followed. She hated that it felt like deception.

She also stockpiled rations, gradually – a cache of dried meats, rough and oily mare’s-milk cheese left in the sun to set up with a hard skin, small pouches of charred seeds with the necessary tools to grind them to be mixed with water. One day, near the mouth of a river system that wound its way into the mountains, she helped the tattooist and a few fierce others gather up their children, and rode them out with horses in the dead of night. The moon was a bloodied disc in the sky.

 _Go,_ she commanded with her mouth a grim line.

When they had vanished in the distance she set back, and gave no explanation for their absence; a rumour spread that she was responsible, though not for a benevolent cause. They were decried as unworthy. The watchful child with a clay stripe grew up, eventually, and gave stirring speeches of how Āter remained.

_Undying she will lead us, and one day soon we too will never die—_

Āter grinned and bit the inside of her cheek to hold back a scream. _Surely you understand,_ she said, gesturing towards the burial sites, _that there is more than one way to remain alive._

They nodded, eagerly. They did not understand.

Then a baby died.

Nothing distinguished this death from so many others except for what the mother did: she attacked Āter.

More than the physical violence, she was shattered against the mother’s wailing, again and again – Āter forgot her name, or never knew it to begin with, but sometimes the wretched noise she’d made haunted her dreams.

Eventually the woman was hauled off Āter by apologetic priests and priestesses who bowed and scraped, although the mother’s fingers still tried to grasp and claw at her.

 _We are sorry,_ they murmured, _we must have failed, and we will make amends. Only do not take more children from us before you share your gifts._

The scratches on Āter’s arms and cheeks sealed themselves up, their lividity fading. That night, Āter stared into the heart of the fire until black voids danced in her vision. What she had witnessed was madness. The cold, still body of a baby, weeks or months old. Someone _launching_ at her.

This was dangerous. She half-remembered an impression for how she’d dealt with something several lifetimes ago – or did she? The details were strange. Embers in her hand, the skin searing and tight until it filled out again. The crack of neckbone between her hands… No, that wouldn’t work. Again, she thought of gathering what things she could carry and setting out alone.

And even then, she could not bring herself to abandon them.

* * *

She left when they began sacrificing people to her.

* * *

Āter of Nowhere wandered.

* * *

She divided her time among the varied peoples of the steppes – further north, beyond the forests, until she got even unto the glaciers. West to places rebuilding from their own population collapses. South, to the mountains and the lush fertile marshes beyond them. East, further afield than she had ever gone before. She felt most at home among those who travelled and lived and made war using horses, even when chariots became involved and the change of their bows changed again.

For a time she tried to lose herself fighting endless skirmishes and raids, for there were battles aplenty when her focus was on locating them. It did not help. Some picked up on this fact. She stopped calling herself Āter. Whomever she was running with at the time got to pick a name, and she would stick with it for as long as she was with them.

 _What are you running from so swiftly?_ Some would laugh, _I will call you Satet._

Or:

_You cry so often, Isḫaḫru._

_Anahit._

_Sudenica._

As before, her name was her function. To run. She who rides a horse. Tears. Cannot die. She passed into myth, and legend. Sometimes she heard of goddesses of the hunt or battle, of fire or justice, and heard elements of her own story or qualities, and wondered if they spoke of her. This would set a familiar cold into her bones, and she would avoid the area for years until the stories no longer resembled her. To be recognized would hazard a repeat of her previous experiences. She could not go back, no matter how far she ventured, yet she found that she migrated regularly to old lands and places she had been.

After a while, she realized that her path was like great looping spirographs traced by a pendulum – ever circling the known earth, never straying too far from her boundaries, and it was driven by a barely acknowledged fear. She worried that she might never find her way home. She was pinned between the two instincts. To flee, and escape as far and frequently as she could, never remaining long enough to make an impression, because the alternative was to be alone with her own thoughts, which was intolerable.

* * *

It came to pass that she needed something more to do than feel sorry for herself.

Her lack of aversion to death endeared her to the people of the Catacombs. She joined them in preparing cattle and horses for burial, slicing off the heads and the hooves; further, in modelling the faces of the dead in clay along the skull, so that their features might be remembered. Sherds of pottery could be found in loose soil at times while digging the shafts for internment; she thought there might be a metaphor in their fragmentation and persistence. Their spirits seemed to whisper to her.

Chisels did not make her fear or flinch; her fingers would be unscathed even if it did slip under her hand and gouge into the flesh. So she created stelae alongside others who built kurgans. These she was most comfortable with; they reminded her of her own practices in a way that did not hurt. She carved figures, bowls, and let the families tend to the depictions of their ancestors. She assisted with the cremations for some cultures and helped bury other deceased persons tenderly, curled on their sides with their cherished belongings.

With the Abashevo, there were often many bodies to bury; sometimes they had her help lay birch bark floors and erect timber walls. All too soon she missed them, for when their culture declined they melted into the forests and did not return. She joined the Srubnaya in hauling timber to construct their graves, despite the splinters this act left in her palms. They were stock breeders who made ritual hearths; they too burned meat, offered bodies. She buried earthly possessions for the dead of the Sintashta. It was a mark of pride for them that they warred so well, they could afford to honour their warriors with massive divestiture of their weapons. They could always produce more, they said, and bronze could be easily come by.

Through all this they grieved in their own ways – offhandedly, or by rending clothing and weeping, or with a hollow numbness she recognized. The people she worked with appreciated her calm, the care with which she worked. At the end they all thanked her for her help. Drops in a jar; eventually they started to help fill her back up in her emptiness.

Building memorials to the honoured dead gave a sense of peace. If nothing else, at least there was comforting familiarity in the practice.

* * *

When she was not an expert in death rites, she traveled. She traded for nephrite, spinel, and lapis from the eastern desert basins; traveled from Anatolia to Assyria to Babylonia and back again. She went north until she met the glaciers. To the far west there were others, who made bad pottery but excellent goldwork.

The islands fascinated her - the turquoise Aegean Sea, the near-countless islands to explore. Upon them were shrines, temples, palaces. In Crete, she canvassed the streets. Shrines to Ariadne were abundant. She ventured the mountains, studied the frescoes. In one of the markets, she came across a young bronze-worker and on a whim decided to observe him for a while. There was a little alcove out of the way, just behind his courtyard, so that others wouldn’t assume anything about her behaviour. Metalworking felt timeless to her, by now, and watching the process was soothing.

He registered her attention, but didn’t address her - just nodded in her direction, and then continued with his work unimpeded and without any change in demeanour. Something about this action of his comforted her; others could not stop trying to _gain_ her attention. So she observed, and he worked. From day to day she watched metal become single-edged swords, javelin-tips; she saw impurities burned or skimmed away, heard hammer ring against metal where it rested on stone. She watched muscles bunch and cord in the firelight, perspiration run rivulets from his hairline into his beard.

After some days, as he took a break to wipe the sweat from his forehead and the grime from his hands, she struck a conversation up herself. Later she would wonder if she was trying to be provocative, reckless.

 _I am older than the process you’re using,_ she said, nodding towards his bench.

_A bold claim – you’d have to be a goddess for it to be so._

_Some have called me one, before._

_And what are you goddess of?_ He humoured her, even as he turned back towards his work.

 _Well,_ she laughed, _the sun, moon, and stars manage just fine without my intervention. If it was anything to do with the sky or land, things would have turned out very differently in the last myriad. And we know it’s not fertility; it seems other goddesses have that domain covered, so I must stand in another section of the pantheon._

_Well, as you have seen I am hard at work – and it is not every day that a goddess graces me with her presence! Usually I must go to the temple for that to occur. Tell me – what reason for this visitation?_

_Boredom._

_Ah! Is that so?_

This man looked into her, and she felt something in her yield under his regard that otherwise wished to be lofty and sardonic.

_Perhaps something baser. Isolation, I think._

_It seems the life of the divine is to be held apart. Are you of the contemporaries, or more ancient?_

_I was there when the Collapse began. I still lived when it ended. I’ve continued, sometimes despite my best efforts._

He nodded, and resumed hammer-shaping his wares.

_That was eons ago – travellers from foreign places sometimes sing of it in recalls. Can you then speak to what caused it?_

She shook her head. _Too many reasons. I could pull at one thread and only show you its colour, but the whole cloth would take weeks to disclose. The soil turned bitter and dusty the harder people tried to work it. The weather was against us; maybe the sky-gods rescinded their favour, as they seem to be again in lands to the east. There was a sickness…_

Her throat closed on her.

 _I hear tales no matter where I go._ _Oracles, manifestations, channels, possession, commune._ _It seems that everyone has a direct line to divinity except for me; if there are other gods, they do not count me among their company. I sit, I quiet my mind, I use…_

She searched around for a local substance that would be recognized for its purpose _._

 _…Poppies. The only voice I hear is my own, and I’m old enough to recognize as much. There are no helpful sages who can explain to me my place in the world. A hawk is not a sign or message; it is just a hawk. I have nothing to guide me but dreams, and those are my own. I don’t think they are_ sent _to me._

_It sounds lonely._

His voice was mild, and any reply she could make hitched uncomfortably before she could let it pass from her mouth.

_It is._

_Maybe that is your place. To be the goddess of the lonely and forsaken._ His hammer struck at the beaten bronze before him. _I lost my wife earlier this year. I don’t think it’s a coincidence you’re here._

 _I can’t offer you anything,_ she hazarded, wary. _I can’t bring her back._

_Ah, but you’ve kept me company these last days, even when we didn’t speak. It has been good to know someone took interest, even just to watch me work. And it’s good to know that something – or someone – endures beyond the end of the world._

He stopped in his work, looking somewhere past her with eyes unfocused. She watched sweat roll down his forearm, tracing along the veins that stood out there like repoussé and chasing. On one level she knew that there was a kind of defiance in asking him to bear some part of her pain; to balance, she was now somewhat afraid of what he would demand in return.

_Come back in a few days. I will have something for you._

The gift he gave to her was an axe – double-bladed, weighty in her palm.

 _This is my gift to you, goddess._ He smiled. _Thank you for your presence, and for trusting me. I had worked on this when my wife sickened, thinking it could be an offering. When she died, it was unfinished. Now I think you are the reason it is done, so that I may move on. I imbue it with life in your honour. When you use this, holding it in your hand – you will feel it._

He was right. And for a time, this helped.

* * *

Happiness found her again in small ways that she didn’t expect.

She returned to the mainland by way of a boat to Miletus, then skirted the borders of the Hittite Empire to arrive at the Black Sea. There was a garden in Colchis. She made wine that she kept in casks, and used a mortar to grind herbs and walnuts together to make a sauce that went well with chickens she beheaded in the yard and plucked by hand. She lived with a woman there, Eteri, for almost 10 years - when Eteri asked her name, she called herself Alyona on a whim and it stuck. Eteri could trace her lineage to the Trialeti, and had a bejewelled cup to prove it. They made bread together, flour dusting their hands, and Alyona kissed her as often as she could. It was the first time she’d let anyone touch her in two lifetimes. They took a small handmade boat out onto the waters and caught fish. Eteri showed her dyeworks, the contemplative practice of working with textiles and thread. Alyona embroidered something for herself, a tunic, and wore it even after Eteri passed until the stitches fell away from decay.

She took pleasure in a thin, diaphanous stretch of dough draped across a slab of stone, smooth and polished, slick with oil. It was layered with honey, fruit, sometimes nuts. She wept the first time she ate them, and every time after for a while. She volunteered in some places to retrieve combs of honey from hives in the nearby groves, or to press jars of oil, so that the local artisans of this sweet could do their work. If someone asked her why she was so moved by the delicacy, she’d be unable to explain – and that in itself was the lesson. Some years later she’d encounter it again, under a different name, and weep anew – a reminder that things could be created, lost, and reinvented.

She took place in wrestling contests among the people of Mycenea, took the gold statues and prizes they gave her, and had these melted down into coins that she could use in all major kingdoms and empires. She competed in archery contests across the steppes, demonstrating the expertise in her shot; axe-throwing, too. For the first time she could remember, she developed a slight toughening of the skin on her palms and the pads of her fingers – callouses, since she was working often enough that they did not have time to fully heal away. She was a champion of the moment, beloved, until she lost her title to someone else.

She held onto these experiences to ground her sense of self throughout the second great Collapse of her lifetime, as people swept from the west by land and sea.

They laid waste to every culture from the Aegean Sea through Anatolia, destroying the cities of the Luwians and the Hittites. The destruction was rampant, and near-absolute. As part of her extended chosen home, she tried to defend and protect the people she’d come to care for. She made a weapon of her rage, her fury, her loss. She led cavalries. She broke herself, sinew and tendon and bone and flesh, against the marauding armies and their sharpened blades. To their terror, she stood again and killed ten men for every death she suffered.

In the end, she was one person with a gift among thousands without, and it did not matter.

Her axe broke from heavy usage. She mourned it. She had it made anew by ironworkers living along the banks of the Dnieper, named it, and kept it.


	5. Chapter 5

When was the first time the woman appeared?

Time devoured the exact memory, the moment, and it was lost.

On subsequent nights dreaming of the woman, she realized what was happening.

Flashes, impressions: small, sleek furred and whiskered beasts that slid into the water; armoured, leathery dragons thrashing their tails languidly to propel through the water; salt marshes, flooded, populated by tall grasses nodding grain-laden heads to kiss the water. Glimpses of feathers adorning bodies. At first, she wondered if she was finally dreaming of an afterlife, or fabled heroes’ fields, or some other reality. But the people darting through her vision in hazy fits and starts seemed real enough. When the recollections of battle began, she registered fear. Anxiety. Pain. Loss. Rage. All of those were familiar enough to her, though the context and the skirmishes were ever shifting. Alyona was utterly unmoored. 

But the woman.

The woman was a constant.

Alyona was at a loss, sifting and carding in shock through her memory, to try and recall the first death. She hadn’t been paying close enough attention to notice. Had it been the time the woman, laughter turned to terror, slipped off her boat into choppy, foaming waves in a muddy, red-tinted river? Or the spears, or the ambush? Was the woman a shaman? A warrior? Whoever she was, Alyona felt her deaths – and she was the same every time, wasn’t she?

Long black hair like a stream at night. Slim wrists, fingertips calloused from hauling back on a bowstring. Keenness. Determination.

She consumed Alyona’s thoughts – Alyona tried to imagine where to go, what seas she would have to sail, what punishment endure, to meet this other immortal? Would she break her body against the mountains? Would she disappear into the horizon, seeing how far the world went? It was gloriously, absurdly maddening. The spans of days or weeks without a dream made her despondent, fevered; each one had her waken, shivering, feeling struck by lightning, gasping for breath, a spear to the lungs, sodden with the mud of sleep, knowing that even if she succumbed to the weight of it the dream was already ghosting away from her. The woman vanished into the mists each time. She felt as though she could endure anything, that she could tolerate anything so long as she got to meet this other woman like her. _She wasn’t the only one_.

Years went by. Alyona registered the shift as the woman’s joy became clouded, her determination frayed at the edges; she began to falter. She travelled through unfamiliar lands. She lost herself.

Alyona couldn’t let that happen. Not to her. Not again.

* * *

After searching hundreds of years, Alyona found the woman in the desert of which they said: _once you go in, you don’t come out._

That may have been true for humans who could die. Alyona rationed her water skin, filled up at oases. Carried pounds of dried food within her satchels. Her skin grew back fresh after sandstorms. She dug herself in under her cloak and left her transport animals behind rather than condemn them. Her bedrolls and weapons she strapped together and carried on her back, tied together with leather thongs and concealed beneath the outermost layer of cloth. She’d passed through the land of the Cimmerians, the Scythians, the herding chiefdoms of the Karasuk culture all to get here, paying her debts and incurring favours owed as she went. Alyona prepared herself to need decades to find the woman now that she’d arrived. 

The dreams did not leave her, this time. It seemed the closer she came to a discovery, the more often the dreams came Even if she was imagining as much, Alyona clung tight to her eagerness. She let it guide her like a star, the rising of the sun, the turning of the heavens.

The woman was exhausted. Paralyzed, almost, but in the spirit. The sun demanded every ounce of strength from her in tribute, and she could not die, and Alyona woke weeping from the force of the woman’s abject loneliness. Someone else who _knew_. Someone else who _understood._ The dunes were innumerable, windswept and relentlessly the same. Alyona trudged along, even after the woman collapsed to the ground and lay there. Once or twice she stirred, seemingly unaware, to dig herself out from the sand.

Alyona didn’t know how many days it had been when she crested the top of one dune, her heels sinking in and settling against nothing truly solid, and saw the figure lying there.

Perhaps she was still dreaming even while awake, for it seemed to Alyona that she experienced a twinning, a doubling, a blurring over her vision. She was there, looking down; she was looking up at herself through eyes so dry they almost couldn’t blink. Her skin was blistered, cracking; her skin was whole, swathed in protective layers of fabric. She fit into herself, finally.

Alyona skidded and flung herself down through the sand with relentless abandon, choking on her need, bursting forward without pause or hesitation. Her legs gave out beneath her, skidding to a halt. She wet the tips of her fingers with precious water and dabbed them along the woman’s brow, her neck, the hollow of her throat, touched a swipe along her lower lip.

When the woman stirred, it was with a horrible rasping sigh from her throat, fingers grasping at the air – Alyona held the water to her mouth and she drank, too quickly, almost draining the skin in one go, hacking and spluttering when she inhaled. Looking on, the wounds and burns were healing. So it was true.

From one of her bags Alyona fumbled out a gauzy span of cloth, as finely woven as she had in her possession, held it over the woman to protect her from the sun.

_It is okay,_ she said in a rush. _You are alright now, I’ve looked for you my whole life, can you hear me?_

Alyona continued in as many tongues as she could think, a sentence at a time, brocading the air with their cadence, delving through as many languages as she could recall from the farthest east she had gone. A language of trade; not any she had mastery over. _You are safe. I am not going to hurt you. I am like you. You are the same as me. You cannot know how – I can’t even say – have you dreamed of me too?_

The woman’s eyes began to clarify in their focus, and although she still lay on the ground, she reached a hand towards Alyona’s face. Alyona realized there were a few tears running down her cheeks, a waste of precious moisture; she licked the salt away from her lips.

The woman spoke, a little, the phrase upturned at the end. And soft, so soft, so quiet from her parched throat.

Alyona frowned.

_Again?_

A long pause. The woman spoke again, different sounds, the same upward inflection of a question.

Alyona’s shoulders and arms began to quake, not from any strain holding up the protective cloth. Of course. She trembled in the confines of her useless form. She boiled from the inside. Because in all her hubris, her idiotic learnedness, Alyona actually dared to believe that when she and the woman met for the first time they’d speak the same language.

* * *

The woman tore into dried fruit with the tips of her fingers, holding small pieces in her mouth to soften before chewing. In the fading light of day, Alyona could see rapture in her face.

She felt carved out, herself, hollowed and heavy and sopping with loathing. It took everything Alyona had not to march, to stumble out onto a dune and collapse to her knees in defeat and shriek to the sky. Her throat was raw enough; she would crack her voice in two. But she’d seen the effect her anger could have far too many times in the past, and she was terrified that the force of her rage untempered and inexplicable would drive this woman to flee from her. Then she’d _truly_ be alone, and that kind of damage would take too long to repair. That didn’t mean she could keep bitterness from leaking out.

_You truly understand nothing that I’m saying?_ She muttered.

The woman looked over to her, then, searchingly. At last, she placed a hand against her chest.

_Quỳnh._

_You know I can’t understand anything you’re saying either, right?_

_Quỳnh,_ the woman repeated more emphatically, tapping with her fingers. Another string of words followed, ending with fingers pointed towards Alyona. They crooked, inviting.

_Which name do you want me to give you?_ She sighed. _I’ve had so many._

Quỳnh frowned. She said something, then, tone emphatic, and rested her hands on the side.

_Fine._ Alyona came out of a recline, tucked her ankles in towards her body and sat cross-legged, feeling the slumping bend in her ancient spine. She closed her eyes so that she could ignore the urgency of the woman’s request. For hundreds of years she’d had a near-constant name - but it had ties back to the first she’d been given, flame, torch, too similar, and all at once she couldn’t bear for Quỳnh to know her by anything with ties to her first death, nor to Eteri, the latest person she’d loved and lost. Something of a joke occurred to her; why not name herself again, after her function, in one of many languages she could think to try? She rested a hand against her treacherous, still-beating heart. _Aiwós._

Eternity. Close enough.

_Aiwós?_ Quỳnh tried the sounds out.

_Yes,_ she said, then remembered to nod.

A small, shy smile emerged on Quỳnh’s face, and she bent; crawled the few feet closer, before kneeling up. Already the rawness on the planes of her face had vanished, leaving a smooth unbroken forehead, soft cheeks, a round chin. Alyona – Aiwós – saw moonlight on the corners of Quỳnh’s mouth, resting like silvering along her neck. Quỳnh reached out a hand – Aiwós felt her fingers pass along the ridge of a cheekbone, caress the outer corner of her eye socket, alight, tenderly, on a temple. She felt the warmth of Quỳnh’s palm against her cheek. She felt the base of Quỳnh’s thumb nearly at the corner of her mouth and had to fight the urge to make the contact more real.

Quỳnh, low and wondering, said something. 

In the absence of comprehension, Aiwós tilted her head more into Quỳnh’s touch.

_I’ve waited for you, or someone like you, for eons,_ she murmured. _I suppose I can wait a little longer. If there’s anything we have an excess of…_

When she withdrew – moments later, or an hour? – Aiwós unrolled a thin hempen mat to layer between the rest of her bedding and the sand, then thin fabrics. The temperature plunged around them; when Aiwós looked over at Quỳnh, the woman was shivering even under the protection of Aiwós’s borrowed cloak.

_Here_. _I will keep watch for both of us. You need sleep_ – she placed both hands pressed together to her cheek and tipped her head to that side – _more than I._ Then she gestured forward, held out a hand to take her cloak back.

Watchful, Quỳnh moved into Aiwós’s space and beyond it; Aiwós found herself shifting to follow her, as though Quỳnh were an axis and she was the wheel. In that moment Aiwós felt the twinning effect again, the shiver of something slipping into alignment – an arrowhead slotting up tight to its painted shaft, or a spindle pulling wool true into thread. Like a knife between ribs making a fatal home. She’d never felt so touched by fate since she’d hauled herself up from mud into the mist and her own bloody, broken future.

Then Quỳnh lay down in the space Aiwós had made for her to use as a bed for the night, and the thread snapped. Aiwós went to turn away… and heard a noise of protest from behind her.

From the ground, Quỳnh was propped up on her elbows. She reached out a hand.

Pivoting, Aiwós drew close. She crouched; Quỳnh, impatiently, grabbed onto Aiwós’s forearm and tugged her forward.

She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue and Aiwós caught herself staring. Quỳnh said something, only a few short syllables, not a question. Then she lay back, not letting go, expecting Aiwós to follow. So she did. Quỳnh turned over, back to Aiwós’s front, cradling herself within an embrace. Until Aiwós settled her body into the contours of the sand, Quỳnh held herself stiff and taut and unmoving. But when Aiwós relaxed, so did she; within moments, her breath steadied and evened out, sounding for all the world like tide sweeping the shore.

Aiwós hardly slept, although she was warm enough. Hours passed, and she was afraid to move in case the ground lurched up beneath her body and she woke and this had all been something dreamt up in a fit of heat-madness. She hardly felt like herself, but like someone in a myth. The moon set, and Aiwós lost the battle against closing her eyes, and the first thing she saw when she woke up was Quỳnh, and her sleep-drenched smile, and the gentle swell and curve of her black hair against Aiwós’s arm. They rose, packed, and ate breakfast in companionable silence. Then, together, they went to find a way out of the desert.

* * *

On their journey, as endless sand gave way to snow-capped mountains faintly etched on the horizon, Aiwós heard Quỳnh begin to work her way through a series of different languages – methodical, asking what sounded like the same question. At least one, tonally, was vaguely familiar. On hearing it, Aiwós nodded, tried to think, drew a cross over her mouth but then spun her hands in front of her like wheels, _keep going,_ and Quỳnh lit up.

It took days until they found one tongue that could be used together – Aiwós knew only bits, scraped together from a distant trading language from the people who used oracle bones in the plateaus. She only had a limited vocabulary; Quỳnh seemed also to struggle with some of the words. Now and again Aiwós caught some being repeated – Gouwu, Yuyue – but she couldn’t make sense of them until much later on. They described some of the peoples Quỳnh had lived among, before the period of her life that she refused to talk about. The language they made between them at first was a broken one, fragmented, but it allowed them to understand each other.

_How long? Life?_

_Thousands._

Quỳnh’s eyes widened at that. She searched around, eyes tipped upwards, held up some fingers.

_Many hundreds._

More often they spoke without words. A series of gestures to indicate intention or instruction. Aiwós became learned in facial grammar and body language to accompany what she tried to say. Through weeks and months that followed, they became better able to communicate. The story eluded her – Aiwós had to distill her meaning into a handful of words, but Quỳnh listened so intently that she persisted even when frustration nearly spoiled her efforts. 

_Your land – you should tell me._

_The ocean; we get food from it, and the river._

_Mine is cold – we travel to survive._

Or another time, as they entered a river valley that plunged between peaks of dizzying height, so tall they blocked the sun in mid-afternoon and plunged them into shadow:

_What do you call this?_

_This – these,_ Aiwós corrected herself, _are mountains._

_Ah! For me, they are…_

So on, and so on. Soon they had enough words to carry a simple conversation – what they could share with each other became like a cord, wrapping around both their hands and keeping them close together. An easiness grew between them that made space for the other – after so long alone, sometimes Aiwós needed a retreat. Or Quỳnh did, and so they exchanged who hunted or fished and who set up camp, who should repair their garments and who should catch a bird for fletching and meat. Of one thing there was no question, as they passed through the mountains of heaven: each night they bedded down, and curled in on each other. They’d gone for weeks in this way, without discussing it, although sometimes Aiwós wasn’t able to sleep for hours. Her insomnia wasn’t from discomfort.

Quỳnh shifted in place one night, seemingly asleep, hips snug against hers, and Aiwós groaned. Quỳnh froze, then turned over until she faced Aiwós, who was mortified.

_I – I am sorry –_

_For what?_

_Please. Forget it,_ Aiwós said, trying to shift backwards so that she could flee. Quỳnh caught her wrist before she could get more than a few inches away – Aiwós felt her pulse trapped there, between Quỳnh’s fingers, ensnared.

_For what?_ Quỳnh repeated, probing. Without releasing her grip, one of Quỳnh’s fingers ran slowly over Aiwós’s palm, back, forth, and Aiwós felt the sensation called forth from the crown of her head, trickling down her spine.

_I…_

_You are already here, for me,_ Quỳnh said at last, letting go of Aiwós’s wrist. She touched her, then, through the fabric of her shirt – just above the swell of her breasts, at the spot where Aiwós felt her heart beating like it wanted to be freed or held. _I have seen you while I slept. I feel I already know you. And you came for me._

She melted in towards Aiwós. _Can I?_

Aiwós answered wordlessly, but not by any means silent. 

* * *

Of course, things changed afterwards.

They listened closely to one another, starting out with the languages whose roots they could trace back furthest and building up from there. Aiwós wasn’t sure how to act or respond to Quỳnh, exactly – there were no ready-worn pathways for such as them to walk, and every glance or gesture or embrace felt like an act of creation. For once, there was someone else who could understand the twinned pains which had plagued Aiwós all her life: to know that anything would heal, which was also a source of fear; to know that all others around them might recover, but more slowly, which generated resentment.

Quỳnh never spoke of her first death or the circumstances that led to it. Aiwós sometimes caught her crying at night.

Yet there was a curious freedom in how Quỳnh reacted to her presence. They poured pleasure back and forth between them, spontaneous encounters. They alchemized pain into pleasure and found healing in the practice as they went. Aiwós would wake ready to tend to her day’s activities, and find that some had already been completed while she slept – food gathered, or cookfire made. Quỳnh led the conversations in some villages they passed through, tending wounds in exchange for a place to rest. The further they progressed, the more Aiwós was able to reciprocate – she fashioned needles out of fish bone, thread from fibres teased out from plant matter, and mended Quỳnh’s clothes. When able, she bought Quỳnh something new to wear – woolen garments made of plain, uncoloured weave, which she embroidered with a thin yarn dyed crimson with madder. Quỳnh clutched the bundle of fabric tight to her without speaking, and Aiwós was worried that she spoke too quickly to be understood, before Quỳnh nearly knocked her over with the force of her embrace.

Aiwós had a clear, perfect memory: Quỳnh, dashing out into the forest clinging to the windward side of the mountain they were on, and dancing in the pouring rain. Her hair becoming plastered to her face, the slender curve of her neck, her shoulders; Quỳnh sticking her tongue out to drink down the sky, and the sound of her delighted laugh. When she returned, soaked through, dripping, she was shivering uncontrollably with cold – but Aiwós saw the expression of joy on Quỳnh’s face, the smile that her chattering teeth could not mar, and felt warm.

This woman, night-blooming flower, began calling her An a few months after they met.

It took An only a month or so longer to learn the meaning:

Safe. Secure.

She thought her heart would escape to the heavens, and live there forever as a star.

* * *

Quỳnh wasn’t entirely sure what to make of horses, the first time An brought her to one. A gelding, angular and tall; it was one raised in the valleys, near the hot, dry plains, and thus very fast. The shorter, shaggy horses were evasive, and An would liked to have shown Quỳnh those, but they were far away in the colder climes. She’d already prepared this one with reins, a felt blanket, a cushion-saddle.

_What am I to do with this?_ Quỳnh eyed the snorting, sleek gelding with trepidation.

_I will teach you how to ride._

_He’s magnificent, but…_

_It will help us to travel more quickly – and to be better prepared when our skills are called on for battle._

_I will never best you._

_Ah, but that is not the goal!_

An was relieved when Quỳnh took her outstretched hand, more so when Quỳnh stepped up into An’s interlaced fingers and vaulted onto the cushion-saddle. An held the reins loosely in a fist, soothing the whickering horse.

_You’ll need to be calm,_ An instructed. _They rely on how we communicate – breath, heart rate, body language. They’ll anticipate your movements, when you know them well enough; sense which direction your head has turned, and confirm their suspicions depending on how you balance._

_So the horse is a mind-reader!_

_Not entirely,_ An began to protest – but Quỳnh was smiling, and An realized she was being teased. _You must learn how to balance, relax, move with the horse._

_Very well._ Quỳnh reached her hand forth, but An shook her head.

_I will keep the reins._

Quỳnh’s brow wrinkled, and An saw her lean forward into the horse’s neck. The horse huffed a breath out, hard, feet tripping in place urgently, and An realized Quỳnh must be squeezing her thighs.

_Relax,_ she soothed. _This is how I have taught others for generations. Will you trust me?_

With visible effort, Quỳnh stilled – she squeezed her eyes shut, breathed in, released the breath in a whoosh from her mouth. _Of course._

_Good. Hands back a little – you can balance them on the shoulders. I will not put pressure any way, but follow your lead._

The sun scudded across the sky, a coin flipped through the air, with how quickly time seemed to pass this way – Quỳnh was overly tentative at first, barely moving from her position on the gelding’s back, but towards the later afternoon she was experimenting more: leaning forward or back, to the sides, squeezing her knees in to speed up or releasing to ease off. At last An passed her the reins. 

_Would you like to try?_

_You think I am ready?_

_You’re off to a better start than so many I’ve known,_ An replied with a smile; Quỳnh returned it. The horse was good, responsive – it listened well as Quỳnh brought it looping around An in gentle circles.

_Good, good._

_This isn’t so hard!_

_You can run him, if you want._

Quỳnh pulled up, and the horse came to a stop.

_Really._

_Yes – in a line, that way. Do you see? Up to the top of that hill._

Quỳnh traced with her eyes along An’s pointed finger, and her eyes narrowed with determination.

_Will you get me set up?_

Obliging, An cleared the way – brought the horse around gently, nudging Quỳnh’s ankle or calf to adjust the way her legs sat on the horse. _Slowly at first -- I’ve seen startled horses buck their riders, trample them underfoot by accident._

_Will you follow?_

_Of course._

Satisfied, Quỳnh nodded. An felt nervy, excited – she watched as Quỳnh prepared herself, centered. She could practically feel the tension in the heartbeats that went by – time itself drew up, and held its breath.

Then, Quỳnh loosed herself, tucking in and gently kicking against the horse’s side. The horse _flew,_ and Quỳnh whooped with excitement. It raced across the grasses, passing quickly between ancient boulders left behind by glaciers in eons past. An couldn’t help herself – she yelled along with them, watching as Quỳnh picked up speed.

But then the woman turned her head over her shoulder to look back. An felt her heart lurch –

_Eyes not on me! Ahead!_ An waved her hand as frantically as she could, and Quỳnh looked back–

The horse swerved to avoid one of those same boulders – a slate-grey behemoth, high at its tallest point as the horse’s belly, embedded with flecks of some other stone, bone-bright in the sun. With that sudden veering off, An saw Quỳnh lose her grip. She scrabbled for purchase, had shifted too much, and she fell to the side, out of sight beyond the rock with a sickening thud. The blanket slid with her, and dropped.

_Quỳnh!_ An screamed.

Silence.

_Quỳnh!_ She cried again, but there was no reply. She launched herself forward, forcefully enough to tear up grass with her heels. The horse was in view, cantering slowly and wheeling in place.

When she crested the rise, Quỳnh was on the ground – a sprawled figure, neck turned to the side and eyes shut. Cold clenched An’s innards in a vice-grip… but as An watched, Quỳnh jerked; she sucked in a huge breath, limbs moving in slow arcs across the ground.

_Stay still – don’t move too much…_

An dropped to her knees beside Quỳnh’s body as it stirred. But then, like a spring bubbling up from a fissure, Quỳnh began to laugh. An rocked back on her heels, stunned.

_Oh – so that’s why you warned me!_

Unconcerned, Quỳnh heaved herself to her elbows. She winced and rolled her neck – An could hear the slight sound of bones clicking back into position.

_Are you alright?_

_Only injured – I think my neck broke! Not the worst I’ve had, certainly one of the funnier – oh An, no! I’m alright!_

Unable to control her expression, An knelt; she wiped furiously at the tears threatening to roll down her cheeks, a sudden involuntary response. The tips of her fingers bit into the tops of her thighs as she knelt.

_What’s wrong?_ Quỳnh asked, reaching out as though to brush something from her face. An beat her to it, using the heel of her hand to rub beneath an eye as though it was merely irritated.

_I’ve never…_ An released all the air she was holding it at once. _Lesser things have been fatal for others. I brace myself, every time you’re hurt, and I can’t help that. I’m still… adjusting. We’ve been fortunate so far._

_I’ve died as many times as I’ve shot arrows,_ Quỳnh said. _And many of those before you met me._ Once more, she stretched her neck, frowning. _Every time, it hurts, and I think it is the worst I’ve ever felt… No, don’t blame yourself. I was the one who turned to see if you were watching._

Speechless, licking dry lips, An watched her get up on her feet. 

_And now I am wiser for it – I trust your eyes are on me,_ Quỳnh finished, helping An up. She looked towards the gelding, which was now grazing. _I suppose I should get back on, shouldn’t I?_

_Are you sure-?_

_I spent the most of my years before I met you afraid. I feel it now, but it cannot be my master._ With that, Quỳnh began marching towards the unconcerned horse, blades of grass slowly disappearing into its mouth. An cleared her throat, wiped her eyes a final time – relief sunk into her bones, to see how quickly Quỳnh had recovered, and she shouted.

_You will have to make it bend if you want to mount!_

As Quỳnh grinned in response, the wind whipped her hair around her face – An’s breath caught again, but for a very different reason.

_An interesting turn of phrase!_

That was how An realized she had been the subject of observation – for Quỳnh clearly had seen her direct a horse to kneel, and the gelding obeyed the command. Quỳnh hopped up on the horse’s back, and was framed against the ceramic-blue of the sky. 

_I want to learn how to fight like this! On horseback!_

_It is possible,_ An replied, collecting herself. _We have ways…_

Eyes bright, Quỳnh grinned ferociously. _What is the most impressive way you can think of?_

An thought for a moment, relaxing by degrees. _My people – we pretend sometimes to retreat, but then sit backwards on the horse and fire on the pursuing enemy. They think it impossible, and frequently scatter or become awestruck…_

_I will learn._

An looked her companion over, studied her, and smiled. _I have no doubt that you will. I will have to fashion or find you a different bow, though._

_Oh, I know you capable – you with your clever hands!_

Before An could absorb Quỳnh’s words or respond, Quỳnh dug in; she corrected the lean of her body, and kicked the horse into a run, hair a banner behind her.

So this was what it felt like, An marvelled, to feel half of a whole. To have someone to keep, and be kept by.

* * *

Some years went on, and Quỳnh increased her competency at a near-dizzying rate. Soon she was able to help the horse bend a knee on her own, or to soothe and brush down her mount until it shone. An loved her the more for the kindness she showed; Quỳnh fed her horse from her own hand, and murmured songs to it in many languages. And soon enough she was indeed able to ride facing backwards – turning around in a fluid motion without falling off, the horse galloping on ahead. Quỳnh fired true, shot after shot, from a handful of arrows she held in her bow-hand. She was devastatingly accurate, and she was An’s.

They travelled long through An’s homelands, lending aid to smaller causes they agreed were manageable. Some were to thieve horses from a herd left out to pasture, semi-wild, and thus close a deficit in the patron’s herd of mare or stallion. Other fights were more personal – to maintain the boundaries and borders of rangeland from people attempting to settle it, or to avenge a dead chieftess or matriarch, or to pursue and kill men who came from afar and stole people from within the camps. Something in An’s bearing was recognized as authoritative, and she was called upon to counsel those they fought beside again and again. She and Quỳnh lived among them as shamans. Not everyone was grateful for their help or how it was rendered, but most mortals were at peace with the results brought about. Soon, they became renowned – notoriously difficult to kill, skilled with bows and axe and blade alike, discerning in which causes they would lend their aid to, yet generally available. Gifts of iron came to them, newer and stronger and far more durable and deadly, and gold, precious stones and rich cloth, leathers and hides. They did not lack for tributes.

Still, what they were seeing took a toll despite their best efforts. The world felt noisier, fuller than ever before with so many more people they almost could not be avoided. Grudges were held longer. Cities and trade outposts clamoured with religion and politics, news from abroad and near, grudges festering and alliances brokered, the expansion and collapse of mighty empires and kingdoms. An felt it; she watched the weight increase on Quỳnh too, although neither of them knew what to do. It came out in uncomfortable ways – a harsh word; a head turning away too quickly; an embrace refused. But still they came together in the night, and wondered what to do next; Quỳnh became avoidant and quiet.

When the latest crisis resolved, An washed herself in a nearby stream to collect her thoughts rehearse what she might ask. She sat in front of Quỳnh, who prodded slowly at the coals in front of her with a stick. Every now and then, she lifted it out of the flames and gazed on the burning end, before shoving it back in like a killing blow. Folding down into a cross-legged seat, An joined her, tucking the hem of her shirt beneath her hips before speaking. 

_We haven’t been ourselves,_ An ventured softly.

_No. No, we haven’t._

_If I have been the cause –_

_Then I would be equally at fault. No, An, it’s not you._

_What do you mean?_

_I have dulled the edge of my emotions,_ Quỳnh said bitterly _, about what it is that we do. I don’t know what that_ is _anymore; I’m tired of fighting, I’m... I have felt like this before, and…_

An tasted ash. Quỳnh fell silent.

_And?_ An prompted at last.

_…It drove me to the desert. All I was trying to do was escape._

The night drew in dark and close around them, and the wind blew – the flames they sat near guttered, and a shower of sparks flew out.

_What do you need?_ An whispered.

_I need to go home,_ Quỳnh said dully, hunched over on herself as though expecting a blow.

The posture was nearly enough to fracture An’s heart. An shifted closer, reached out with her fingertips to touch the edge of Quỳnh’s hand. Quỳnh flinched slightly.

_Very well._

_…Do you mean it?_

An took her hand more securely.

_I would go anywhere with you. I don’t want to go so far from you that we could not find each other again. If home is what you need, we will cache our things tomorrow and I will travel with you there._

Quỳnh was silent for a moment, glancing away to hide her face. Even so, An could hear the tentative hope in her voice. _Just you and me, then?_

_Just you and me._

She leaned on An’s shoulder; they rested there until it was time to leave, and the stars wheeled in their performance across the sky, the oldest one An could recall.


	6. Chapter 6

For a generation they returned to and remained in the kingdoms of Văn Lang or Âu Việt. They traversed south, through the hills and along the rivers to the capital in Phong Châu. Something came back to life, slowly, while they were there: Quỳnh began to laugh more readily, to tease An back.

She spoke of living with the Đồng Dậu people, although when they arrived where she intended to, they found instead the Gò Mun. Quỳnh cooked sticky rice for her on a pan, and caught fish with clever hooks. Further still, Quỳnh introduced An to some people of the Sa Huỳnh culture – An traded precious dark nephrite to be made into a lingling-o pendant as a gift to Quỳnh, and Quỳnh swore she would never take it off. In the mountains near the coast, An saw a horned animal – lashed eyes, black and white markings on its face like tattoos, hooves that carried it lightly through the undergrowth. Quỳnh called it a saola, and they watched it pass without trying to kill it – into the green it disappeared, and An got misty-eyed without knowing why.

They travelled together through sophisticated farmlands – rice fields designed to work with regular floods, a system of dikes and irrigation canals for these and other crops which cleverly caught the tidal waters. For a time, Quỳnh invested her in the art of bronze-casting; they found local masters who dreamt of ever more elaborate patterns and enormous works, showcasing histories on the side of drums. An and Quỳnh cut their hair short, blackened their teeth, chewed betel nut and areca leaf as a stimulant and spat red onto the banks of the sông Lam. Quỳnh, slyly, mentioned that this last activity made them inseparable.

_I think I’ve been going about this entirely wrong._

_How do you mean?_ Quỳnh asked, eating pandan sticky rice off a leaf.

_I was so excited to have someone to fight alongside that I forgot what made a life, and what I love about where I’m from. Would you let me show you?_

She tattooed Quỳnh with intricate designs while they returned, eastward, to the Great Steppe. The pinprick markings faded, unerringly, over the span of a fortnight or so rather than stay permanently rendered; but there was something unnameable that passed between them while An held Quỳnh steady beneath her hands, marked her, traced careful designs into her skin that bloomed into being as she rubbed charcoal-paste from soot into the tiny wounds before they sealed.

Quỳnh hardly ever gasped in pain during the process – just gripped An’s hand so tightly that the skin blanched. Sometimes Quỳnh retaliated, deliciously, after washing up, and demanded An’s full attention on the artwork she’d wrought. They went stealthily to sit in the mastic groves near green-gold Thrace, steady and patient, collecting resin to chew. An devised a gift, then watched Quỳnh’s eyes shine in glassy wonder at the boots that An produced for her from leather, scaled with gold, along with supple breeches, a golden belt, a woolen-felt headdress that would keep her warm in the cold months. She approximated some of the designs of Quỳnh’s people as best she could, and dreamt of the ringing sound of metal drums singing.

What was An to do with all this intimacy? With all of her previous partners, she’d bestowed gifts and experiences generously – but melancholy had plagued her, because she knew their time was limited. The concept of longevity in this relationship was destabilizing. It implied a different sort of continuity; accountability, perhaps.

Quỳnh caught her staring, one night, the moon bright enough to see by.

_What is it?_

_…How long has it been since we found each other?_

_Truly? I can’t say!_

_Nor I,_ An spoke through dry lips, which she anxiously wet. _But I know I cannot imagine being without you, anymore. I don’t remember what it was like._

Quỳnh returned her gaze for so long that An felt pinioned by her stare.

_Of all that I nurture within myself,_ Quỳnh said at last, _I think my love for you I like the best._

They’d slept with each other so many times before that night, and An knew they would afterwards – but she still held Quỳnh close as she could, cried Quỳnh’s name softly against the skin between shoulder and neck when she came, said it over and over like a chant, a prayer, a mantra. An had known and forgotten so much love that lived too short a time, and this was the first love she’d had that might not die.

* * *

The Greeks had a number of outposts – largely for trade – scattered throughout the lands just north of the great seas – near the steppe, within easy access of both the Iberians and the Achaemenid-Persian Empire. An felt the pull of her homeland as something orienting within her, like an awl drawn to a lodestone, so at times she still bristled at what felt like an incursion by outsiders. By now there were more than enough wars to go around – dynastic disputes, empire-building campaigns, the rapid rise and fall of kingdoms. Incursions, plunder, refugees, battle, counter-attack. It was almost easier not to pay attention to whomever was in power; An knew that in a matter of months, or even weeks in some places, the names of rulers were likely to change again. 

It was near a river that An felt most estranged – they found asphodel and amaranth flowers, cut and placed at a small shrine with a wooden carving to represent the goddess Artemis. An would recognize her anywhere, by now; more than a few times, An or some of her companions had been confused for Artemis or the Amazons when they emerged from the forests, bows out and hunting dogs beside them, only to stumble on an encampment of Greeks bound for the colonies. Quỳnh took on the task of fishing in the river for their lunch, hauling a net out from her pack and untangling it. In the meantime, An had found some good, straight, slim branches to make into arrow shafts. Despite herself, her eyes were drawn over and over again to the little shrine, the flowers bright against green grasses nodding and drooping as if in slumber.

At last, Quỳnh stepped towards the banks and An found her voice.

_Can I tell you something?_

_Anything,_ Quỳnh said.

_They used to worship me,_ An said.

Quỳnh paused, the nets falling slack in her grip. She looked over at An, a slight furrow in her brow.

_The mortals?_

An drew her knees in towards her body, aware that doing so would communicate something – she fought against the urge to shrink. Her precious iron knife was heavy and cold in her grip; she scraped it away from her again, another curl of wood falling away.

_Yes. Was it the same for you?_

Squinting, Quỳnh peered into the water – the sun flashed and flickered along the surface, the glittering flow uninterrupted.

_My concept of the divine is different. I still think we are more than human… Immortals, to be sure. The truth may be somewhere in between._ Quỳnh stretched, cast the net out into the river again. _There’s a rare opportunity in what you and I have been given – the chance to cultivate gentleness, to repair, to correct. Inwardly, and outward._

_I thought for so long my purpose was to fight._

_Does it have to be? Your nature is not only one thing. Nor is mine._

The river hurried past them, unconcerned with their conversation; An looked down the shaft of the arrow she was making, testing how straight and true it was. Quỳnh was so still. If An were skilled with a chisel and stone…

_It was easier when I thought I could give them what they wanted,_ she said. _But I no longer know whose cause is worth favouring, if anyone’s._

When Quỳnh yelped, An thought it was in response to what she’d said and she startled, taken aback. But as Quỳnh hauled a dripping net forth, a wriggling silver flash caught amongst the tight-woven fibres, An saw the cause of the outburst was only dinner. Quỳnh brought the fish over to a rock, striking it near the base of the head to kill it quickly. Only then did she turn to An with a follow-up query, rinsing her hands in the water.

_And what is it that you want?_

_To be less involved,_ An began, but then shook her head ruefully and laughed. _No, but already I know that’s wrong, and isn’t it funny that I fulfill my own prophecy? I tell myself over and over I will walk away, but know I won’t be able to stop myself._

_I do love that about you,_ Quỳnh said, shaking her hands off and patting them dry against her tunic as she approached.

_Maybe… Maybe I want to leave their choices to them. I don’t want to lead anyone, anymore._

_We will be together for a while,_ Quỳnh said. _Until the end, whatever end that may be._

Quỳnh took An’s face between her hands, icy from the river-water. She kissed her as though taking a long draught from a wine-skin, and withdrew only a little ways so that all An could see was her face and dark, dancing eyes.

_So let’s make these decisions together, as we have._

_As we have,_ An whispered hoarsely.

Then Quỳnh smiled, kissed her quickly, and inclined her head towards An’s belt. _May I borrow your knife?_

She gutted the fish while An leaned back onto her elbows. Ahead of her, the statuette of Artemis held her own council.

_Who were you_ , An wondered softly, _and_ _if you existed, were you only ever human as well?_

_What was that?_

_Talking to myself. Do you need me to make a fire?_

They ate, and packed their things, and Quỳnh left a measure of olive oil at Artemis’s feet to be polite.

* * *

* * *

Enough occupied their time for some dozens of years. Mat Aššur _,_ the Assyrian Empire, seemed to almost constantly be warring within its own borders and without: Babylonia, Urartu, Media, Persia, Hattu, Aram, Egypt, Phrygia, Lydia, and countless others. In the chaos, their goals became simple: Quỳnh favoured the causes of women and refugees, helping them find safety in siege or raid. An disguised herself many times as a man and pretended to be a soldier in order to gain intelligence from within their ranks. When it made sense, they allied themselves with the horse-riding tribes of the steppe – though for the most part, they were not above making these alliances temporary, if a leader had proven to treat the indentured of the steppe with cruelty. Mostly, they tried to protect the vulnerable. Sometimes they were wise in their judgment. Other times, they paid the price of ignorance, or incomplete knowledge, or poor foresight. But they were only human.

As promised, they divided where they spent their time as equitably as possible, and so eventually they went east to the land of the hegemons and the Zhao dynasty. An had no time for reading or writing, but Quỳnh had taken more of an interest in it – cuneiform, Sanskrit, other scripts – and so also turned her attention to acquiring and mastering the characters painted on bamboo-slip scrolls. Fortunately, this made it much easier to recognize arrest warrants when they were issued by the kings or dukes of Qin, Jin, Song, and Chu, given that many of the scrolls she studied from belonged to them. Eventually, she returned the Spring and Autumn Annals where she’d gotten them, and retreated with An to Wu for a lengthy period. She and An were more welcome there, and contributed their thoughts to an author working on a philosophy of war - he called it an Art.

One night it came to pass that An laid down her head to sleep and dreamt of the sun – a man with a spear – crimson blood against dark skin – searing, crushing pain in the belly. She woke with a gasp at the same moment as Quỳnh, and they stared at each other in the dark while a bird cried out to announce the morning.

_Was that—?_

_Is he…?_

Quỳnh was clutching her lower ribcage, and lifted her hand up as though expecting to find blood.

_We have to go back, don’t we?_ Quỳnh stated, not asking, touching along her spine like she anticipated damage there too.

An nodded, already thinking about the green she’d seen – plants bordering a huge lake, hulking grey and leathery-skinned creatures with huge teeth like stelae jutting from their lower jaw and a booming cry that filled up her head. Crocodiles, too. Yet she knew it was a lake that she’d looked upon, not a sea, because _he_ knew it was a lake, and been crushed by one of the grey creatures.

_I think we do._

They would pass back near the lands of Persia on their return – hearing of the campaigns of Darius the Great while they did so – but for the moment, An was only exhilarated near the point of sickness, for there was _another._

* * *

They met the man from their dreams later, when Alexander marched forward through Asia, and he was one of the warmest souls An had ever encountered in her life. He danced; he gathered red clay in his hands and transformed it into figures of humans; he joined her in hawk-hunting. They first met him in Gaza, helping to additionally fortify the city. By now, word had spread of what befell Tyre, and people were both terrified and determined. He demonstrated his skill with weapons, and showed both of them what happened when he cut himself against its edge to confirm his identity. 

An's heart lurched when he told his story: that he left his people.

_What drew you away?_

_The chance to find others,_ Lykon said with a grin. _And because I was sent._

_Sent?_ She fears the worst – exile. Being driven off.

_To do good in the world. To be the strength of others. I am uniquely placed to do so._ He scanned them briefly. _Much as you, I believe._

Quỳnh took An aside that night. _What do you think?_

_If we were not meant to find him, would he have appeared in our dreams?_

With a shake of her head, Quỳnh dispelled any worry that might have frayed at the edges of An’s certainty. _I don’t think so either. We’ve never_ dealt _with something like this before, An– it’s felt as though empires rose and fell around me, just out of reach, never this close, and now there is a third like us? The question then is how we are meant to involve ourselves._

_What does your heart tell you?_

_We’ve seen what this Alexander does to the women and children he conquers,_ Quỳnh says tightly. _I would fight for their sake._

An nodded, then said, _If Lykon will come with us, would you go with me?_

_Go? Where?_

_North. Then east. Alexander has been taking the coast, but that can’t be the extent of his ambition – the commander of this city suspects as much, I heard him talking to those stockpiling provisions. He amasses power, and puts down anyone who poses a challenge to it. I would at least warn people what is coming. Some may think him liberator, others a hero – I am not certain, but I have met men like him before that think themselves deities. It never ends well._

After a few moments of deliberation and pacing, Quỳnh joined her – she embraced An tight, forcefully, and held both of her shoulders with the strong hands An had come to love.

_If you think we ought to try to get ahead of this, we should talk to him._

Lykon joined them later that evening on a high city wall looking north. They explained their thoughts; he heard them, and smiled patiently with even, white teeth that gleamed against the ebony of his skin like ivory.

_Who am I to disregard those who’ve walked the earth as long as you? What is your plan?_

_I know a route northward to Colchis,_ An replied at last, giving voice to the thoughts which had raced through her head all night. _A shortcut. My people have been beleaguered for years, but there are pockets of us still in the lands north of the Caucasus... and there are some we might be able to unite against this Alexander. The one thing all conquerors have in common is that they fear power being wrested from them – the leaders of the nomads of the Steppe are sometimes power-thirsty; they have not forgotten Darius and hold no great love for Persia, but they have greater hate for Phillip II, and I believe some might stand against his son. If we encounter Thalestris and her people along the way, so be it – we’ll inform her of what has transpired, and she and her warriors can decide what course they’ll pursue._

_We might be wrong. Time marches on, relentless either way, and we’ve got no way to know whether things would be better without our intervention. But what you’ve said feels true for me._ Quỳnh stood straight, and An had never been more proud of her – their presences braided together, and she was more whole than ever before. _With two of us, we accomplished much – who’s to say what we could do with three? If your people sent you, I am thankful that it helped us meet._

_Then let us try,_ Lykon said.

An looked once more towards the horizon, where even now Alexander of Macedon must be marching towards Gaza with his armies.

_Let us try._

* * *

Alexander was emperor for a time. Then the Wars of the Diadochi in his wake, and the rise of Ptolemy. They remained. The three of them were in a garden one day, An carving up a pomegranate with a knife and Lykon weaving cord to use as belting, when Quỳnh erupted into view carrying something wrapped in fabric under her arm.

_Are we going to need to run again?_

_No, but you_ will _want to keep this for some time!_

An lifted an eyebrow, but Quỳnh was unrepentant. She carefully placed what she held down on a table, lifting away each corner almost teasingly.

_Do you remember,_ she said, _when I made you sit in front of that man for hours?_

_I remember…_

Lykon was leaning over the table, bracing himself on his palms; An saw his face brighten and both of them look towards her expectantly.

_It shows your face, An,_ said Lykon, flipping the bright tail of his head-wrap over his shoulder. Sure enough, when she half-rose from sitting she saw her likeness rendered there in bright pigments – her eyes looking forward, hair coiled atop her head in a classic Greek style unlike most she’d ever worn, and bound with a diadem. Nevertheless, it was recognizable – and it was lovely. She leaned forward – the small wooden board smelled faintly of beeswax.

_You are famous among the people of this region. They say you are an Amazon come again, with how you fought. Have you heard yet what they call you?_ Quỳnh asked, mischief in her eye.

_No. Is that what’s written here?_

_They are calling you Andromache, sometimes Andronika. Andromache the Scythian. They have written you down – or their idea of you and your peoples. Not just in the myths, which are never kind – but in historical texts, ethnographies. Those are more accurate, or at least make an effort since they have a different purpose._

A Scythian. A rider and nomad from the east, what the Greeks called all those of the Pontic Steppe and beyond, not bothering to know any of the names they called themselves. But it placed her somewhere. It spoke of where she came from.

Quỳnh looked at her, expectant, waiting to see how she would react.

_Andromache,_ she tested, then smiled.

_Fighter of men!_ Lykon laughed. _How descriptive._

An stood there, looking at the first image of herself that was not in a reflection in a pool or burnished metal surface, the two people she loved most looking on. Time folded in on itself, again and again, layering enough that it almost had a substance to it, something she could touch. She’d entered history – there was no taking that back. Who knew how she was remembered, what myths and legends were being spoken even now, what she was attributed with doing? And yet… _Andromache._ It had the sound of the name Quỳnh had given her in it too – the seed at the heart of the word. _Strength. Security._ A double-meaning, a secret one, embedded forever in one of the countless names she’d been given but hadn’t asked for. Something she could choose.

Andromache the Scythian replied, “I like the sound of that.” 

**Author's Note:**

> In addition to andromachete, who shared her artistic talent, went above and beyond the requirements, and is the _loveliest_ , I need to thank my beta-readers without whom this fic would have languished forever. Thank you to the incomparable Tyellas for your fannish mentorship, and for helping me refine the final details; and my phenomenal, supportive wife starfoozle! They were my partner in the extensive research which informed this fic, a sounding board for any-time yelling sessions as I worked through the narrative details, and incredibly encouraging when I started doubting myself. 
> 
> This fanfiction has been a work in progress since July 2020, when I first watched the movie and started delving into the history of the Neolithic and Bronze Age Eurasian Steppe. When sign-ups opened for the Big Bang, this fic was about halfway done - this event was the push I needed to work through the remainder of the story, and the event organizers have my appreciation for making the event process so smooth! I'm so excited to see other fans also thinking about and discussing Andy's possible backstory, the cultures she may have come from, and her relationship to Quynh and Lykon! Exploring history because of this fandom has been an incredibly enriching and cool experience. 
> 
> In coming weeks I hope to share appendices to the fic in the form of meta write-ups based on some of the sources I consulted, including _The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World_ by Adrienne Mayor, _The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: how Bronze-Age riders from the Eurasian Steppes shaped the modern world_ by David W. Anthony, and _Viet Nam : A History from Earliest Times to the Present_ by Ben Kiernan. I'll also aim to share further thoughts about some of the details included throughout related to names, locations, and events! This author's note will be updated with links to the posts!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading.


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